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The new Cybercom will be a subunit of the U.S. Strategic Command and will be commanded by the director of the National Security Agency. It is expected to be headquartered with NSA at Fort Meade, Md., and to reach initial operating capacity in October, with full operating capacity coming in October 2010.

The order is recognition that cyberspace is a distinct military domain, along with land, sea and air, and the Defense Department must be prepared to defend and conduct offensive operations in it.

“Cyberspace and its associated technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to the United States and are vital to our nation’s security and, by extension, to all aspects of military operations,” Gates wrote in his order. “Yet our increasing dependency on cyberspace, alongside a growing array of cyber threats and vulnerabilities, adds a new element of risk to our national security. To address this risk effectively and to secure freedom of action in cyberspace, the Department of Defense requires a command that possesses the required technical capability and remains focused on the integration of cyberspace operations.”

So why is there so much concern about “cyber-terrorism”? Answering a question with a question: who frames the debate? Much of the data are gathered by ultra-secretive government agencies—which need to justify their own existence—and cyber-security companies—which derive commercial benefits from popular anxiety. Journalists do not help. Gloomy scenarios and speculations about cyber-Armaggedon draw attention, even if they are relatively short on facts.

Politicians, too, deserve some blame, as they are usually quick to draw parallels between cyber-terrorism and conventional terrorism—often for geopolitical convenience—while glossing over the vast differences that make military metaphors inappropriate.

Twitter has an issue ahead of them. After this experience the general populace has learned how to participate in cyber civil unrest. Twitter will be used in the future for hacking attacks and the targets of attacks may find legal cause to complain.

The State Department has created a huge issue by supporting Twitter. I hope they know what they are doing.

But how bad would a cyberwar really be — especially when compared with the blood-and-guts genuine article? And is there really a chance it would happen at all?

Whatever the answer, governments are readying themselves for the Big One.

We see, for example, that Estonia’s  computer emergency response team responded to the junk packets with technical aplomb and coolheaded professionalism, while Estonia’s leadership … well, didn’t. Faced with DDoS and nationalistic, cross-border hacktivism — nuisances that have plagued the rest of the wired world for the better part of a decade — Estonia’s leaders lost perspective.

Here’s the best quote, from the speaker of the Estonian parliament, Ene Ergma: "When I look at a nuclear explosion, and the explosion that happened in our country in May, I see the same thing."

The nation’s top spy, Michael McConnell, thinks the threat of cyberarmageddon! is so great that the U.S. government should have unfettered and warrantless access to U.S. citizens’ Google search histories, private e-mails and file transfers, in order to spot the cyberterrorists in our midst.

That’s according to a sprawling 18-page story on the Director of

National Intelligence by Lawrence Wright in the January 21 edition of the New Yorker. (The story is not online).

In the piece, McConnell returns, in flamboyant style, to his exaggerating ways, hyping threats and statistics to further his bureaucratic aims. For example, McConnell regurgitates the hoary myth that computer crime costs America $100 billion a year. THREAT LEVEL traced down the source of that fake-factoid in September to a former privacy officer for the state of Colorado.

Presumably using unsupported stats like that, in May 2007 McConnell convinced President Bush that a massive cyber-attack on a single U.S. bank would be worse for the economy than than the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, the article reports. In response, the NSA developed a mind-boggling, but still incomplete, plan to eavesdrop on the internet in order to protect it.

In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. "Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation," he said. Giorgio warned me, "We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’"

It says something ominous about McConnell’s priorities if he believes a DDOS attack on Bank of America, or even a computer intrusion that wiped out its database (and magically purged its backup tapes), would be worse than an attack that killed 3,000 Americans.

Still, it’s hardly a surprising plan — given that McConnell was one of the main backers of the Clipper Chip, the government’s failed, early 1990’s proposal to put a backdoor in every encryption product.

The $105 billion figure has been bouncing around the media like a bad check for two years, being quietly debunked by security experts and the tech press (including InformationWeek, in 2005), even as the more mainstream media nurture and love it.

Chinese hackers may have been responsible for the recent power outage in Florida, and the widespread blackout that struck the northeastern U.S. in 2003, according to a new report in the National Journal that shows the intelligence community taking cyberwar hysteria to new and dizzying heights.

The story, citing computer security professionals, who in turn cite unnamed U.S. intelligence officials, says that China’s People’s Liberation Army may have cracked the computers controlling the U.S. power grid to trigger the cascading 2003 blackout that cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and a Canadian province.

It’s official: Cyberterror is the new yellowcake uranium.

Ever since intelligence chief Michael McConnell decided on cyberterrorism as the latest raison d’etre for warrantless NSA surveillance, we’ve seen increasingly brazen falsehoods and unverifiable cyberattack stories coming from him and his subordinates, from McConnell’s bogus claim that cyberattacks cost the U.S. economy $100 billion a year, to one intelligence official’s vague assertion that hackers have caused electrical blackouts in unnamed countries overseas.

This time, though, they’ve attached their tale to  the most thoroughly investigated power incident in U.S. history.

Or maybe I’m being naive. Maybe there were no trees. Implicit in this new cyberterror tale is the suggestion that everybody who investigated the 2003 blackout, including FirstEnergy, the Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the civilian North American Electric Reliability Council, were part of a massive conspiracy to conceal a (pointless) Chinese hack attack from the American people.

Now that we’re seeing "overgrown trees" between the same scare quotes conspiracy theorists bracket around "lone gunman" and "moon landing," the cybarmageddon hawks have squarely set foot in the realm of 9/11 truthers. I’m waiting for them to blame Chinese hackers for "Hurricane" Katrina.

Overseeing the Cybermonitor

James Bamford is a writer and documentary producer specializing in intelligence and national security issues. His most recent book, his third on the National Security Agency, is “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA, From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.”

Arms Control in Cyberspace

Ron Deibert is the director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the co-founder of the Information Warfare Monitor report, and one of the principal investigators and a co-author of the GhostNet study investigating alleged Chinese cyberespionage.

The president acknowledges the globally interconnected character of cyberspace in detail. But curiously there is not even a strategic vision, much less a blueprint, for how the United States will work to protect global networks as part of its own security.

Indeed, the biggest black hole — likely to remain as such — concerns U.S. offensive operations in cyberspace, which presumably include everything from denial of service attacks to targeted malware to Web 2.0 psychological operations.

I rather naively hoped today would have been President Obama’s Eisenhower moment, an opportunity to lay out a grand strategic vision for “Bits for Peace” (or maybe an “Open Net Initiative”?) and take leadership in swiftly controlling weapons in cyberspace worldwide. Instead, it is almost certain (and it is among the worst kept secrets) that a stamp of approval is forthcoming for the Pentagon’s plans to fight and win wars in cyberspace.

Undoubtedly the move will trigger an escalation of attack strategies and incidences from adversaries, including Russia and China, who will see the U.S. policy as a ratcheting of threats and a legitimization of such tactics. And we can expect more debilitating attacks on Websites and services, contracted out to third parties to muddy attribution issues and allow for plausible deniability.

Today’s announcement does nothing to explain how to secure against the chaos unleashed by that threat. Ultimately the assurance of security for every nation’s critical infrastructure must include an international dimension that preserves the openness of global cyberspace.

The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare.

The military command would complement a civilian effort to be announced by President Obama on Friday that would overhaul the way the United States safeguards its computer networks.

The White House has never said whether Mr. Obama embraces the idea that the United States should use cyberweapons, and the public announcement on Friday is expected to focus solely on defensive steps and the government’s acknowledgment that it needs to be better organized to face the threat from foes attacking military, government and commercial online systems.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has pushed for the Pentagon to become better organized to address the security threat.

Officials declined to describe potential offensive operations, but said they now viewed cyberspace as comparable to more traditional battlefields.

“We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyberoperations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain,“ said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. “We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment.”