http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/11/beijings-electronic-pearl-harbor/
By Brett M. Decker and William C. Triplett II U.S. national security endangered by China’s army of hackers
The following is an excerpt from “Bowing to Beijing” (Regnery Publishing, Nov. 14, 2011):
In November 1997, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism that “we’re facing the possibility of an electronic Pearl Harbor. … There is going to be an electronic attack on this country some time in the future.” Two years later, he told a secret session of the House Armed Services Committee, “We are at war – right now. We are in cyberwar.” Fast-forward more than a decade, to 2011. President Obama’s choice for secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, tells the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing that the United States faces a possible “electronic Pearl Harbor.” Mr. Panetta had been the CIA director for the previous two years – so he would have known.
Two extreme, nearly identical warnings 12 years apart should have brought home the magnitude of the electronic threat facing the country. Yet nothing was done. When former Director of National IntelligenceAdm. Mike McConnell was asked directly by Congress about our ability to withstand such an onslaught, he replied, “The United States is not prepared for such an attack.”
The Obama administration has shown a shocking disinterest in this threat, earning it a blunt rebuke from former White House national security official Richard Clarke. While “our government is engaged in defending only its own networks … it is failing in its responsibility to protect the rest of America from Chinese cyber-attack,” Mr. Clarke wrote in the Wall Street Journal. In other words, the federal government has taken action to protect itself, but not the rest of us. Mr. Clarke further declared that “senior U.S. officials know well that the government of China is systematically attacking the computer networks of the U.S. government and American corporations,” and yet, “In private, U.S. officials admit that the government has no strategy to stop the Chinese cyber-assault.”