Opinion

WHEN GOTHAM GOES DARK:TERRORISM’S TAKING ON A NEW FACE FOR THE COMPUTER AGE

WASHINGTON

DELTA Flight 1765, the 6:30 shuttle from La Guardia, lifted off directly over Rikers Island Monday evening. Full darkness had fallen; the Halogen-bright rows of street lamps below were at crisp right angles to one another, appropriate for a prison, and even from 1,200 feet it was clear that all was calm and orderly.

Presently the entire New York Metro area was twinkling peacefully in the night — an enchanting, but otherwise unremarkable, vista. Civilization, such as it is, rests on the ability to light up the night, reliably and cheaply — and Gotham got it right a long time ago.

So, Tuesday morning, it was startling to discover just how easily the lights could be put out — all of them, and for long enough to test the social contract sorely.

The venue was the sparkling Ronald Reagan International Trade Center and the premise was this: America has jumped headfirst into the Information Age, and now it is hugely vulnerable to a new form of warfare — cyberterrorism.

What is cyberterrorism? Tuesday’s hosts (Jane’s Information Group, the folks who publish the fighting-ships book) define it as the coupling of information systems to the threat of violence to generate fear in support of a political agenda — in particular, by targeting advanced technologies deployed by potential targets.

Tomorrow’s terrorists will use electrons — perhaps, for example, to compromise the computer networks that control electrical distribution across North America.

The operative term is SCADA: Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. This is geek-speak for the nerve systems that animate our high-tech society. Regarding electricity, it’s a SCADA that recognizes a sudden demand for power in New York and gins up dormant generating capacity in Canada, or Ohio, to fill it.

When SCADA goes wrong, it can go spectacularly wrong. In 1996, a tree branch fell and knocked out a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. transmission line in Northern California. The computers took over and sent power surging from one utility to another — the term is “cascading” — and when the overload switches finally stopped flipping, seven states and much of Canada were in darkness.

For two days.

If a tree branch can do that, imagine what determined, mature computer hackers could do. Especially since much of the critical data they’d need is — by law! — free for the taking on the Internet.

These wouldn’t be kids — teenaged malcontents out to impress friends — but the real deal: highly trained, well-financed, probably state-sponsored techies exploiting an embittered, perhaps debt-ridden, power company employee recruited expressly to kill the electric grids.

“Somebody with 25 years of real experience, and a team behind [him],” terrorism expert Fred Cohen said Tuesday. “These are the fellows you need to worry about.”

And not just them.

Good news, bad news: The United States pretty much has its Y2K problem under control, says Cohen. But the nation is painfully short of homegrown technicians — so to fix Y2K “we had to hire thousands from the former Soviet Union, from China, from India. It’s a good bet that there are all sorts of Trojan horses” — latent computer viruses — “embedded in critical infrastructure all over the place.

“What if [an embedded virus] took down a part of the power grid in the northern United States in the winter? That would kill a lot of people. What if [one] took down a nuclear power plant? And the media found out about it?”

What if the terrorists then presented demands?

“This would bring fear into play to achieve political goals,” says Cohen, somewhat understating his point.

That, of course, is classic terrorism — the clandestine application of violence to win concessions that can’t be achieved openly — but with a 21st-century twist.

If the world took one overriding lesson from the Gulf War (and the Kosovo aerial campaign) it’s this: Nobody is going to prevail against the United States in a conventional military matchup. Not anytime soon.

But going to war against America’s information infrastructure is an entirely different matter.

SCADA, you see, isn’t only about electrical grids. Centralized data-control systems run the nation’s natural-gas and fresh-water distribution networks, its air-traffic-control system, its railroads — even New York’s subways.

The nation’s banking web is automated (think ATMs, but only as a start.) And then there’s Wall Street — in thrall to computerized trading programs, and thus rendered frighteningly vulnerable to computer-driven malevolence.

But is America a pushover? Far from it. Cohen said Tuesday that critical computer systems are constantly being probed — who knows from where. So far, he added, security has been pretty good. So far.

Over the long run, though, security must be perfect; the terrorists only have to be lucky.

And have you noticed how early it gets dark these days?

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E-mail: mcmanus@nypost.com