• Wired Blog, Friday, November 10, 2006 12:30 PM

In 2004, Robert Gates, President Bush's choice to replace Donald Rumsfeld as the new defense secretary, said that cyberterrorism could be the most devastating weapon of mass destruction of all, potentially crippling the U.S. economy.

Wired writers Ryan Singel and Kevin Poulsen dug up the Associated Press story where the former CIA director makes this assertion. "Please!" they said--"Let that be hyperbole by the AP, and not an accurate reflection of what's in our next defense secretary's head." They worry that Gates could easily go overboard in his attempts to "protect" American users from cyberterrorism, repeatedly subpoenaing information from Web giants like Google and Yahoo, and overcharging users with "conspiracy to commit cyber-crime," etc. Strict legal action could also curtail the tracking measures of online advertisers.

"When a teenage hacker in the Philippines overnight can wreak $10 billion in damage to the U.S. economy by implanting a virus, imagine what a sophisticated, well-funded effort to attack the computer base of our economy could accomplish," Gates said at a two-day conference at Rice University.

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