Clinton Offers Plan to Fight Digital Terror

President Clinton opened a new front in the war on global terrorism--and rogue teenage hackers--Friday by unveiling a comprehensive plan aimed at preventing potentially devastating computer attacks on America’s critical infrastructure, from power plants to banks.

The first governmentwide effort to defend the amorphous and borderless realm known as cyberspace may be most notable for its recognition that the threat of terrorism in the 21st century is not just from low-tech car bombs and plane hijackings but from technologically savvy zealots and hackers at home and abroad.

Disclosure of the new strategy came as law enforcement and intelligence agencies continued what senior U.S. officials called the largest counter-terrorism operation in U.S. history. Sparked by arrests last month on the U.S.-Canada border and in Jordan, the effort has entailed sharply stepped-up protection, surveillance and investigation efforts in more than 30 countries.

“We live in an age when one person sitting at one computer can come up with an idea, travel through cyberspace and take humanity to new heights,” Clinton said. “Yet someone can sit at the same computer, hack into a computer system and potentially paralyze a company, a city or a government.”

The plan proposes that Congress increase federal spending for computer security and research by $280 million to $2.3 billion next year. The money also would create a kind of GI Bill for aspiring computer wizards, offering college and graduate degree scholarships in an effort to build an elite government corps of information technology specialists.

Secretary of Commerce Bill Daley said that the plan--dubbed Version 1.0, as early software releases often are known--will affect 22 federal agencies. Future versions, he said, will focus on state and local governments as well as the private sector in a joint effort to protect America’s telecommunications, water supply, emergency services and other key systems linked by computers.

“This is the first time in American history that we in the federal government alone cannot protect our infrastructure,” Daley said. “We can’t hire an army or a police force that’s large enough to protect all of America’s cell phones or pagers or computer networks.”

Richard Clarke, counter-terrorism chief at the White House, said that terrorists are not the only danger. “There’s a spectrum, from the teenage hacker who sort of joy rides in cyberspace, up through industrial espionage, up through fraud and theft and up at the far end of the spectrum to another country using information warfare against our infrastructure,” he said.

Government and private computer networks are anonymously hacked every day, with intrusions originating from around the world. The most severe penetration into unclassified Pentagon, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Energy Department and other government networks lasted over a year and was traced to Russia. But the FBI investigation into that penetration, code-named “Moonlight Maze,” remains open.

The government’s anti-terrorism investigation was sparked last month after an Algerian man, Ahmed Ressam, was arrested as he allegedly tried to drive a car loaded with bomb detonators and powerful explosives into Washington state. Several other people subsequently were arrested in Vermont and New York.

The terrorist threat was heightened by the separate arrest by Jordanian authorities of 13 men allegedly directed by fugitive Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, who is accused of masterminding the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The group allegedly planned to bomb hotels and religious sites.

“Terrorist cells were disrupted in eight countries, and attacks were almost certainly prevented” as a result of the U.S.-led operation, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, said Thursday at the National Press Club.

U.S. officials declined to identify the eight countries. Terror-related arrests have been reported in Canada and Pakistan, as well as in the United States and Jordan.

“We disrupted a lot of planning activity, a lot of movements, but mainly planning,” Michael Sheehan, chief of counter-terrorism at the State Department, said in a telephone interview. “There’s a general sense that at a minimum we deferred an attack. Whether it eliminated it, no one can say.”

Sheehan said that the terrorism investigation prompted action in “dozens of countries,” leading to increased protection for U.S. officials and more snooping by spy agencies. “In between, you had everything from rounding up the usual suspects, to stepped-up surveillance of those you can’t arrest, to arrests on lesser charges like smuggling.”

Ressam’s case remains a conundrum. Despite his known ties to supporters of Algeria’s militant Armed Islamic Group, known as GIA, which Washington considers a terrorist organization, investigators have yet to find proof that the extremist Algerian group was directing Ressam.

“We don’t have any evidence that it’s a GIA activity,” Sheehan said. “It appears more like GIA personnel acting for their own agenda. What we’re unsure of is their outside links.”

Similarly, despite widespread speculation and an intense investigation, authorities have yet to establish clear links between Ressam and Bin Laden.

“You can’t show Bin Laden’s hand pushing Ressam across the border” from Canada, a U.S. intelligence official said Friday. “We know he had links with people who were involved with Bin Laden’s organization. Whether they had some role in this is still very much an open question.”

Sheehan said that no decision had yet been reached to extend or modify a Dec. 21 State Department warning to U.S. citizens abroad to avoid large gatherings and to vary regular travel routines until mid-January because of potential terrorism. The warning was based on intelligence obtained after the arrests in Jordan.

In many ways, the threat to tourists in Jordan, Ressam’s explosive-filled car and the dramatic eight-day hijacking over Christmas of an Indian Airlines passenger jet by Kashmiri separatists seem a grim throwback to the terror tactics of the past.

But experts say the distant events mask the radically changing threat of terrorism today, an era when terrorists are more sophisticated, more elusive and, most important, more deadly than ever.

Computers are part of the problem. In addition to the danger of cyber-attackk, more than a dozen terrorist groups use Internet Web sites for propaganda, recruitment and money-raising. In several cases, investigators have found terrorists using encryption technology and other electronic tools to hide their communication and plans.

More broadly, experts fear that the next generation of trans-national terrorists will finally succeed in gaining access to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

“We know at least 15 organizations around the world that are interested in this,” said Kamal A. Beyoghlow, professor of national security at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Va.

“More and more terrorists have been arrested, extradited and convicted around the world,” said Philip C. Wilcox Jr., ex-counter-terrorism chief at the State Department. “That’s the good news.”

But individual attacks are increasingly lethal. In 1998, for example, the State Department reported 273 terrorist attacks, the lowest annual total since 1971. But the death toll was the highest ever--741 killed and 5,952 wounded. Most, including 12 Americans killed that year, resulted from the embassy bombings in Africa.

“The terrorist mind set has changed in fundamental ways,” said Mansoor Ijaz, a counter-terrorism expert. “It’s no longer enough to just go into a crowded sidewalk cafe and kill innocent people. Now they want to go after basic infrastructure. They want to bring down whole countries.”