Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyber-Terrorism Review

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(More customer reviews)Verton's book is full of hyperbole, repetition, unsupported statements, and contradictions. It is poorly written, poorly organized, and poorly edited. His "research" consists mostly of quoting his own magazine articles (29 times) and the magazine he writes for (16 times). By comparison, he quotes from only three books. Example of hyperbole: In commmenting on a admittedly fictional scenario called Dark Winter, the author claims that, "entire communities and cities could be rendered as helpless as those affected by the Black Death of the 14th century, a bubonic plague that killed one third of Europe's population." Yet, he fails to support that claim with any evidence or even a reference to the report on the exercise.
He repeats the same story about an al Qaeda interview with an Italian journalist in his introduction and again at p. 98. He writes nearly the same sentence about radical terrorists living in the U.S. once in the main text on p. 5 and again in a footnote on the same page. He tells a story about the Ptech company at p. 111 and again at p. 223-25, and uses nearly the identical paragraph in each. Where is the editing to catch these duplications?
Worse yet, his uses the Ptech story to draw two contradictory conclusions. In the first telling, he says that Ptech is an example of al Qaeda using American companies as fronts for terrorist financing. He claims that "evidence was uncovered" to show this connection. Yet, two pages later, he asserts that the FBI has been "unsuccessful in finding any evidence linking Ptech to terrorism financing." Then in the second telling of the Ptech story, he uses it as an example of how the War on Terrorism has turned into a "virtual witch-hunt," using a "scorched-earth strategy" [more hyperbole] that has "left many innocent casualties in its wake." The reader is left confused whether Ptech serves as an example of al Qaeda using American companies as fronts for terrorist financing, or an example of the War on Terrorism spoiling the reputation of innocent American enterprises.
Even his definition of cyber-terrorism is contradicted by his own material. He defines cyber-terrorism as either the use of cyber-tools to destroy critical infrastructure, or traditional terrorism that has a destructive effect on electronic and Internet infrastructure. See Introduction at xx. But in his appendix, he quotes the FBI definition of cyber-terrorism, which is narrower--the use of cyber-tools to shut down or destroy critical national infrastructures.
From his overly broad definition of cyber-terrorism, the author strays into three fictional scenarios of terrorism that seem to be the centerpiece of his book. They are supposed to scare us into thinking that cyber-terrorism can really happen. But if they are fictional, how can they alarm us? And, even as fiction, none of them even fits the FBI's definition of cyber-terrorism. The first, Black Ice, starts with a ice storm, not a cyber-attack. The second, Blue Cascades, was described vaguely as "a cyber system failure ... caused by a prolonged power outage." The third, Dark Winter, was a smallpox outbreak.
Many years ago, a famous fast food restaurant ran an ad that said, "where's the beef?" After reading this book, I have to ask, "where's the cyber-attack?"

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The first book to define the clear and present danger posed by a cyber-terrorist attack on the U.S. computer- and network-dependent infrastructure. The pages are packed with interviews from members of terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, as well as key insiders involved in planning and executing the U.S. plan for the defense of cyberspace, including Tom Ridge, James Gilmore, CIA and NSA officials--and even al-Qaeda supporters. Internet security expert Dan Verton investigates how cyber-terrorism could occur, what the global and financial implications are, the impact this is having and will continue to have on privacy and civil liberties, and how to prepare and prevent against cyber-terrorism.

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