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Richard A. Clarke, the blunt, sometimes abrasive White House adviser who raised the alarm about security threats ranging from biological to computer terrorism for more than a decade, quietly resigned Friday as President Bush's cybersecurity czar.
In an interview after his last day in office, Clarke warned that although the government has made considerable progress in defending its electronic infrastructure from computer attacks, the United States faces ever greater peril, given its growing dependence on the Internet.
"A sophisticated cyberattack may not result in massive deaths," he said. "But it could really hurt our economy and diminish our ability to respond to a crisis, especially if it is combined with a war, or a terrorist attack."
Clarke said he was leaving his post now because "11 years in the White House and a total of 30 in government is more than enough," and because Bush would soon present a new national strategy to protect the nation's information infrastructure, which Clarke and his team had drafted.
Associates said Clarke was becoming increasingly weary of battling a federal bureaucracy that was resistant to considering new issues like cyberterrorism as real threats.
Clarke dismissed reports that his bureaucratic opponents had blocked him from being offered a senior post in the new Department of Homeland Security.
In a recent book, Anthony Lake, a national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, called Clarke "a bulldog of a bureaucrat" and noted that his "bluntness toward those at his level" had not earned him "universal affection."
Clarke said, "This was not a popularity contest. When you are working on life-and-death issues, you sometimes have to bring out the bulldozer."
Clarke said the attack last weekend by a computer bug known as the Sapphire worm showed the vulnerability of America's increasingly Internet-based economy. Though it was a relatively simple bug, he said, Sapphire, which also has been called Slammer, ravaged systems throughout the United States and overseas in just a few hours, shutting down some of the Bank of America's automated teller machines and Continental Airlines' online ticketing system, and denying Internet access to millions of personal computer owners.
"Don't assume that the damage done by hackers in the past is predictive of the future," Clarke said. "As Sept. 11 showed, as long as our vulnerabilities are large, some enemy will exploit them in a new and hugely damaging way."
Before tackling the country's computer vulnerabilities, Clarke was in charge of the White House's counterterrorism office for Bush and Clinton. He sometimes antagonized officials in federal agencies and even some White House colleagues by demanding more aggressive action against Islamic extremists such as Osama bin Laden.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, colleagues said, he played a critical role in the White House situation room, helping to ground the nation's airliners and boosting security at other vulnerable targets.
Clarke said the nation is safer today than before Sept. 11 because Al-Qaida's sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone and because Americans have rounded up hundreds of Al-Qaida operatives abroad and tightened aviation security overseas and domestically.
"But we still don't have control of our borders, or sufficient control of terrorist money transfers," he said. "And we still don't know where all the potential sleeper cells are in the U.S."
At the same time, he said, he fears that civil rights might be eroding in the struggle against terrorism. "When we sacrifice our civil liberties and privacy rights, the terrorists win because they have gotten us to change the nature of our country," he said.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/3627912.html
In an interview after his last day in office, Clarke warned that although the government has made considerable progress in defending its electronic infrastructure from computer attacks, the United States faces ever greater peril, given its growing dependence on the Internet.
"A sophisticated cyberattack may not result in massive deaths," he said. "But it could really hurt our economy and diminish our ability to respond to a crisis, especially if it is combined with a war, or a terrorist attack."
Clarke said he was leaving his post now because "11 years in the White House and a total of 30 in government is more than enough," and because Bush would soon present a new national strategy to protect the nation's information infrastructure, which Clarke and his team had drafted.
Associates said Clarke was becoming increasingly weary of battling a federal bureaucracy that was resistant to considering new issues like cyberterrorism as real threats.
Clarke dismissed reports that his bureaucratic opponents had blocked him from being offered a senior post in the new Department of Homeland Security.
In a recent book, Anthony Lake, a national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, called Clarke "a bulldog of a bureaucrat" and noted that his "bluntness toward those at his level" had not earned him "universal affection."
Clarke said, "This was not a popularity contest. When you are working on life-and-death issues, you sometimes have to bring out the bulldozer."
Clarke said the attack last weekend by a computer bug known as the Sapphire worm showed the vulnerability of America's increasingly Internet-based economy. Though it was a relatively simple bug, he said, Sapphire, which also has been called Slammer, ravaged systems throughout the United States and overseas in just a few hours, shutting down some of the Bank of America's automated teller machines and Continental Airlines' online ticketing system, and denying Internet access to millions of personal computer owners.
"Don't assume that the damage done by hackers in the past is predictive of the future," Clarke said. "As Sept. 11 showed, as long as our vulnerabilities are large, some enemy will exploit them in a new and hugely damaging way."
Before tackling the country's computer vulnerabilities, Clarke was in charge of the White House's counterterrorism office for Bush and Clinton. He sometimes antagonized officials in federal agencies and even some White House colleagues by demanding more aggressive action against Islamic extremists such as Osama bin Laden.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, colleagues said, he played a critical role in the White House situation room, helping to ground the nation's airliners and boosting security at other vulnerable targets.
Clarke said the nation is safer today than before Sept. 11 because Al-Qaida's sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone and because Americans have rounded up hundreds of Al-Qaida operatives abroad and tightened aviation security overseas and domestically.
"But we still don't have control of our borders, or sufficient control of terrorist money transfers," he said. "And we still don't know where all the potential sleeper cells are in the U.S."
At the same time, he said, he fears that civil rights might be eroding in the struggle against terrorism. "When we sacrifice our civil liberties and privacy rights, the terrorists win because they have gotten us to change the nature of our country," he said.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/3627912.html