Catastrophic Cyber Consequences: “Blowback, Revenge Beyond Our Imaginings”

Clarke, who served three presidents as counterterrorism czar, now operates a cybersecurity consultancy called Good Harbor, located in one of those anonymous office towers in Arlington, Virginia, that triangulate the Pentagon and the Capitol in more ways than one. I had come to talk to him about what’s been done since the urgent alarm he’d sounded in his recent book, Cyber War. The book’s central argument is that, while the United States has developed the capability to conduct an offensive cyberwar, we have virtually no defense against the cyberattacks that he says are targeting us now, and will be in the future.

Richard Clarke’s warnings may sound overly dramatic until you remember that he was the man, in September of 2001, who tried to get the White House to act on his warnings that Al Qaeda was preparing a spectacular attack on American soil.

Clarke later delivered a famous apology to the American people in his testimony to the 9/11 Commission: “Your government failed you.”

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“The picture you paint in your book,” I said to Clarke, “is of a U.S. totally vulnerable to cyberattack. But there is no defense, really, is there?” There are billions of portals, trapdoors, “exploits,” as the cybersecurity guys call them, ready to be hacked.

“There isn’t today,” he agrees. Worse, he continues, catastrophic consequences may result from using our cyber­offense without having a cyberdefense: blowback, revenge beyond our imaginings.

“The U.S. government is involved in espionage against other governments,” he says flatly. “There’s a big difference, however, between the kind of cyberespionage the United States government does and China. The U.S. government doesn’t hack its way into Airbus and give Airbus the secrets to Boeing [many believe that Chinese hackers gave Boeing secrets to Airbus]. We don’t hack our way into a Chinese computer company like Huawei and provide the secrets of Huawei technology to their American competitor Cisco. [He believes Microsoft, too, was a victim of a Chinese cyber con game.] We don’t do that.”

What do we do then?”

“We hack our way into foreign governments and collect the information off their networks. The same kind of information a CIA agent in the old days would try to buy from a spy.”

“So you’re talking about diplomatic stuff?”

“Diplomatic, military stuff but not commercial competitor stuff.”

As Clarke continued, he disclosed a belief we’re engaged in a very different, very dramatic new way of using our cyberoffense capability

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