I watched the Cyberwar Special and found it disgusting. It was so bad I don't even know where to start. The guests they had were annoying, but journalistic dishonesty was infuriating.

They had several government bueaucrats with a large stake in generating a climate of fear around internet security. Their top star was Richard Clark, who was paid to be paranoid during the Clinton years. If I were to make a list of jackass bureaucrats, Richard Clark would be on the top of that list. He took advantage of 9/11 to attack his boss, promote his book, and is now drumming up support for an idiotic program to start dictating business practices to American software companies (well, one American company that we all love to hate: Microsoft).

The program went to great pains to make a statement that Al-Qaida was planning a cyber-attack. They noted that they found diagrams of dams in Al-Qaida training camps. The editors pushed the idea that Al-Quaida was planning to launch a cyber attack on the electronic sluice gates for these dams, because "it would take tons of explosives to destroy the dams". Um, the truck bomb driven by Timothy McVeigh had about 4000 lbs of explosives - two tons. I'm far more afraid of people blowing things up than duping some moronic secretary into infecting the office computers with an email worm.

The terrorism portion of cyberterrorism is a lie. It is simply cyber mischief. Even the supposed "dollar losses" from hackers is fairly suspect. If some hacker keeps me from shopping at Amazon for a few days then in those two days Amazon loses money from me, but after I get my internet back, I buy whatever I was going to buy anyways, so there is no net loss.