THE CLOWNS OF CYBERWAR: Rediscovering electronic Pearl Harbor, always handy fodder for the lazy opinion page editor

In today's Los Angeles Times, electronic Pearl Harbor mania is unimaginatively recycled through the wisdom and beneficence of Jim Newton, editor of the opinion pages.

Capable of winning over dullards at water fountains and in restrooms nationwide, Duncan E. Hollis of Temple University writes, "Estonia claimed to be under attack last spring, but not by guns or bombs."

"Likewise, last month ... hackers somewhere in China infiltrated a U.S. Defense Department Network ..."

And, the US government-run secret strapped-down chicken test showed we must be afraid:

"...[Researchers] at the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory managed to make a generator self-destruct."

"So computers don't just threaten other computers but the larger infrastructure. Viruses could become as dangerous as missiles. At the same time, cyberattacks have the potential to minimize the costs of conflict in lives and dollars. Instead of demolishing an electrical grid, cyberattacks offer militaries the option of disabling it temporarily."

Hey, dude, pitch a techno-thriller book proposal.

"Cyberwar undoubtably will attract groups like al Qaeda; the technology is inexpensive, easy to use and can be deployed from almost anywhere," the man rambles on, just like countless other before him, including celebrities like Richard Clarke.

DD, colleague Rob Rosenberger (of the USAF's actual first information warfare squadron way back in the last century) and a handful of other experts stamped out belief in electronic Pearl Harbor prior to 9/11 but there are always a couple from universities, those who were still either in high school or undergraduates in the late Nineties when we did it.

Nine-one-one quashed most of them with the exception of the occasional dead-ender hankering for a job in the computer security industry.

Estonia, a good place for an alleged cyberwar because no real journalists were actually interested in actually wasting their time in going there to investigate it, is a fine repeatable tale in the tradition of digital warstories.

Cyberwar has always been said to be easy to do. Al Qaeda has always been said to be working on it. Before al Qaeda, it was Russia, China, India, North Korea. Even Saddam Hussein was imagined to be readying a US-smashing Internet strike force.

Computer viruses were regularly said to be about to become as dangerous as high explosives. And if I had one crisp Ben Franklin for each statement like this in my archive, DD could walk down the to the local Pasadena Hummer dealership and drive off the lot with one after paying in cash.

In 1998, a leading proponent of cyberwar was James Adams. Adams wrote a best-selling book about it called "The Next World War."

DD gave it poor marks in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Entitled "Truth is the first casualty of cyberwar," it read:

Concern is growing in many quarters that society's reliance on computers has made it extremely vulnerable to attack via keyboard. Journalist James Adams has written a new book, "The Next World War," which claims that information warfare will be the battleground of the future. At the Pentagon, military theorists ponder how to defend America against hackers in the employ of a foreign power who might use the Internet to turn off the electricity, paralyze the armed forces, cause corporations to crumble and write dirty words on your Web site.

Before you run screaming from your computer and haul the old manual typewriter out of the closet, look closely at the source of these cyber-scares. It turns out that many of them are information-age ghost stories that get spookier with every telling.

Mr. Adams's book passes along a couple of hoary tales. The first revolves around the idea that the National Security Agency developed a computer virus for use in the Gulf War. Supposedly secreted in the hardware of computer equipment destined for Iraq--printers, in the most popular variation--the virus was somehow designed to bushwhack Iraqi air defense computers hooked to the same network. This is implausible on its face: A printer has neither the hardware space nor the capability to spontaneously transmit programs, which is what computer viruses are, to other computers on a network.

The printer-virus story is very similar to an April Fool's joke published in a 1991 issue of Infoworld magazine. The story was subsequently picked up in "Triumph Without Victory," U.S. News & World Report's book on the Gulf War. Many have fallen for it besides Mr. Adams. In 1997, a Hudson Institute researcher gave it credence in an analysis of "Russian Views on Electronic and Information Warfare."

The second beguiling myth perpetuated by Mr. Adams and many others is that of the electromagnetic pulse gun. Since at least 1992, teenage hackers desperate for media attention have been spinning elaborate tales about this exotic weapon, usually said to be cobbled together out of a few hundred dollars worth of electronic trinkets, radio antennae, bailing wire and automobile batteries. This electronic rifle is allegedly capable of destroying computers by firing an assortment of electromagnetic waves. Mr. Adams reprints part of a 1996 interview in Forbes ASAP in which a hacker insists these are the "poor man's nuke." At a hackers' convention in Las Vegas, one participant-- appropriately named "Ph0n-E"--even showed off a bogus contraption that he claimed was a pulse gun.

Obviously, the genesis of this idea lies in a 1962 nuclear test whose electromagnetic pulses famously blocked radio communications. But no one has been able to overcome the basic physics problem of packing these pulses into a gun: Any such weapon would have an effective range of only a few feet while requiring a power supply so large it would severely burn, if not kill, whoever fired the weapon.

Indeed, no genuine pulse gun has ever been produced for examination. But that hasn't stopped Congress's Joint Economic Committee from holding two unintentionally amusing hearings, in June 1997 and February 1998, on the matter. Apocryphal claims have even spread that unnamed British financial institutions have had their computers electrocuted by such weapons.

Some other cyberwar myths making the rounds:

In 1997, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's commission on reducing government secrecy issued a report containing a chapter devoted to computer security. In a boxed-out quote, the commission uncritically reported: "One company whose officials met with the Commission warned its employees against reading an e-mail entitled Penpal. . . . Although the message appeared to be a friendly letter, it contained a virus that could infect the hard drive and destroy all data present." Actually Penpal is a notorious Internet hoax. In this instance, the pranksters took in a commission whose members included former intelligence agency chiefs John Deutch and Martin Faga. The spring issue of the U.S. Army War College's scholarly journal, Parameters, contained an article by Lt. Col. Timothy L. Thomas that soberly mentioned a computer virus called Russian Virus 666 allegedly capable of putting computer users into a trance in which they could be made to suffer from arrhythmia of the heart. The virus's satanic name should have been a tip-off. Yet while no one would give credence to a military publication that wrote about, say, salvaging weapons technology from UFOs, readers seem to leave logic behind when the subject is computers. In the December 1996 issue of the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin, two academics, Andra Katz of Wichita State University and David Carter of Michigan State, discuss the "Clinton virus" which was "designed to infect programs, but . . . eradicates itself when it cannot decide which program to infect." To the chagrin of the authors, the indecisive "Clinton virus" was revealed to be another Internet joke.

Oh well, look at the bright side: Cyberwar is cheap. Dueling jokes, myths and hoaxes cost almost nothing to produce and even less to spread.

The bad review did not discourage Adams.

Adams started a private sector intelligence firm -- iDefense -- to sell advisements to the US government and other gullibles in corporate America. It went bankrupt a few years later.

"How sweet to be an idiot, as harmless as a cloud/Too small too hide the sun, almost poking fun at the warm but insecure, untidy crowd," sang Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, sometime in 1968. "Hey you, you're such a pedant! You got as much brain as a dead ant ... But I still love you."

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Recently: The Yellow Peril -- PLA cyberwarriors rile Pentagon, allegedly.