World War III

(This is only a test…so far)

A major weapons system for World War III got a test this week and the news barely managed to surface in the swirling stew of Michael Jackson, Steve McNair and Michelle Obama’s European trip wardrobe.

Hackers targeted dozens of major U.S. internet sites, both private and government, and managed to shut down or severely slow some of them, including the Treasury Department and the Federal Trade Commission. Some sites, such as Whitehouse.gov and the Pentagon, were able to shrug off the attack. Targets were reported to include the sites of the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Washington Post, and others.

Because the list of sites that came under attack also includes South Korean sites, officials suspect that the world’s No.1 Naughty Playmate, North Korea, may be the bad guys here. After all, Kim Jong Il and his buddies have exploded nuclear bombs and launched missiles, so maybe this cyber-sideshow is their doing.

Maybe. Except it’s not a sideshow. What happened over the holiday weekend and into this week should be as chilling as a squadron of 1941 Japanese attack planes doing practice runs over Hawaii. And shrugging it off is just as silly as having much of our naval might clustered neatly in the harbor while our planes were lined up wingtip-to-wingtip on the tarmac.

We have made much of how our society is becoming completely integrated into the internet. It’s how many of us get our news, contact each other or the government, pay our taxes and our bills, get paid, do our banking and shopping, run our businesses and do our work. With every passing day, the internet becomes so much a part of how we perceive, manage and enjoy the thing we call The United States that politicians now call for universal broadband as they once called for rural electrification.

That’s why the weekend’s events are a lot more serious than most seem to realize. Although they focused on overwhelming target sites with bogus traffic, not fiddling with their internal data, these attacks demonstrated sophistication and resources with potential for much harm.

Well, yeah, but let’s not get carried away – it’s just the internet, right?

Right. It’s just the internet, which last year filed 58 percent of our tax returns, the IRS says.

So let’s put it this way. If last weekend saw someone try to bomb the interstate highway system, the Post Office, the Federal Reserve, airports, railways, bus stations, telephone exchanges, mass media, banks, newspapers, broadcast stations and other institutions, that would be serious stuff.

And that’s exactly what happened last weekend and early this week. The United States of America was attacked by a power or powers unknown, testing weapons capable of seriously disrupting our social and economic systems.

Our government isn’t saying much. Let’s hope it’s doing more.

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