OMG! Cyber War! Cyber War! We're Doomed! (Or Not.)

"Stop the apocalyptic rhetoric. The alarmist scenarios dominating policy discourse may be good for the cybersecurity-industrial complex, but they aren't doing real security any favors," write former Reason intern Tate Watkins and Mercatus' Jerry Brito today at Wired.

The dynamic duo—who have debunked the cybersecurity threat in Reason's pages as well—lay out the mechanism whereby threats of cyber war are systematically inflated by the devout fearful and those who stand to gain—panicked Internet Baptists and their military-industrial-complex bootlegger buddies:

Rhetoric about cyber catastrophe resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War…

The media may be contributing to threat inflation today by uncritically reporting alarmist views of potential cyber threats. For example, a 2009 front page Wall Street Journal story reported that the U.S. power grid had been penetrated by Chinese and Russian hackers and laced with logic bombs. The article is often cited as evidence that the power grid is rigged to blow.

Yet similar to Judith Miller's Iraq WMD reporting, the only sources for the article's claim that infrastructure has been compromised are anonymous U.S. intelligence officials. With little specificity about the alleged infiltrations, readers are left with no way to verify the claims. More alarmingly, when Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) took to the Senate floor to introduce the comprehensive cybersecurity bill that she co-authored with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the evidence she cited to support a pressing need for regulation included this very Wall Street Journal story.

And now, some alarming large numbers in a paragraph studded with the names of defense contractors:

The U.S. government is expected to spend $10.5 billion a year on information security by 2015, and analysts have estimated the worldwide market to be as much as $140 billion a year. The Defense Department has said it is seeking more than $3.2 billion in cybersecurity funding for 2012. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, L-3 Communications, SAIC, and BAE Systems have all launched cybersecurity divisions in recent years. 

Check out the smartypants academic version of Watkins and Brito's report.

Read lots more skeptical approaches to cyber war (plus a great deal of hate for the word cyber in any context).