President Clinton has discovered a surprising benefit to labeling computer crime as a form of warfare: It can make the most blatant felony nice and legal if the crooks are on the government payroll.
The current issue of Newsweek reports that the president has issued a highly classified "finding" authorizing the CIA to use its particular talents to nail Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
According to the magazine, the CIA is empowered to secretly school Kosovar rebels in the fine art of sabotage-- a rather traditional training role for CIA schoolmasters.
Far more interesting is the president's alleged order that the CIA must use its hacking skills to penetrate the international banking system, and loot Milosevic's bank accounts in Russia, Cyprus, and Greece.
Newsweek calls it "cyberwar." But, of course, we aren't at war with Greece.
The plan raises interesting questions. Can the CIA-- who couldn't prevent hackers from cracking its website and changing its name to the Central Stupidity Agency in 1996-- break into foreign bank computers in order to pull off the heist?
Newsweek suggests that the men in black may cheat a little. Citing anonymous intelligence officials, the magazine says the CIA will turn to its big brother, the National Security Agency, for help with the robbery. I'd guess that the larger and more powerful tech spies, drawing on their Echelon global surveillance network, might be able to take the money and run, provided none of the targeted banks read Newsweek.
This forces the moral question. Even the most desparate, hard-boiled cyberpunk would normally balk at an electronic bank heist. As Clinton's Justice Department has stated, cracking a bank computer and stealing money is no different from drilling the safe open in the middle of the night. What kind of pressures have turned our commander in chief into a capo de tutti capi?
It was just this year that Clinton, while visiting the National Academy of Sciences, spoke of the evil that hackers do.
"We already are seeing the first wave of deliberate cyberattacks," warned a clearly alarmed Clinton. "Hackers break into government and business computers, stealing and destroying information, raiding bank accounts, running up credit card charges, extorting money by threats to unleash computer viruses."
Indeed, the administration has pushed its dark view of the computer underground with great zeal, and more than a few, well, tall tales. In March, Department of Justice computer crime chief Scott Charney regaled a gathering of bankers with the story of a 1997 hacker who crashed a telephone switch, resulting in the landing lights at a Massachusetts airport going black.
Regular readers of this column will recall my conversation with the airport administrator, who assured me that his runway lights never even flickered.
The list of similar misstatements by DOJ and Pentagon officials would provide grist for a hundred articles. The claims are always made to prove the threat of "information warfare," and I naïvely assumed that the alarmist propaganda was meant to, as they say, "cultivate the national will."
So the president's plan to break into private computers in friendly countries came as something of an epiphany. This is the other side of linking computer crime to warfare. Under the new situational ethics of "cyberwar," we can raid Milosevic's bank accounts, even in friendly nations.
We can even run up his credit card bill, or extort money from him with threats to unleash computer viruses. Hell, let's crack his website while we're at it, subscribe him to some unwanted mailing lists, and send him a couple of pizzas.
"We've got to let everyone know that it is wrong to invade another person's computer," said Attorney General Janet Reno at a White House press conference in January.
The international banking industry would probably agree with Reno, even as it prepares for an electronic assault ordered by her boss.
