Perspective: Cyber warsSounding the Alarm about Another Kind of 9/11

Richard Clarke knows some things about clear and present dangers. As the first U.S. counterterrorism czar, he tried to alert important White House decision-makers before September 11 about the threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, but those warnings were largely ignored; afterwards, he famously apologized publicly for the government’s failures. These days, Clarke is trying to get people to think hard about the next big attack—the cyber version—and all the ones that have already happened.

Clarke’s new book, The Fifth Domain, written with Obama’s former cybersecurity czar Robert Knake, is in many ways a follow-up to a book they wrote in 2012 called Cyber War. Alex Pasternak writes in Fast Company that that book was derided by some at the time as science fiction, Clarke laments; now he has the benefit of a sci-fi-like series of developments to illustrate his case. Though we’ve been blindsided by a slew of giant hacks, thefts, and attacks, the prospect of a cyber 9/11 is still hard to grasp. Maybe “9/11” is the wrong metaphor. “The big cyberattack is going to be something that undermines our democracy in a way that leads Americans to question the viability of our system,” says Eric Rosenbach, the Pentagon’s former cyberczar and one of many experts interviewed for the book.

Clarke says that’s exactly what happened in 2016, when Russian agents hacked emails, spread propaganda, and launched attacks on voting systems to interfere with the U.S. election. He worries cyberwar could lead to a shooting war too, especially now that the Trump administration has taken a more aggressive stance to cyberconfrontations. “Every time I see the U.S. and Iran getting closer to something, I worry that it could get out of control because I don’t think we’re ready,” he says.