Why the U.S. should worry about cybersecurity

A Q&A with former national security official Richard Clark.

While Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the Obama Administration agree that cyber attacks are bad, there's little agreement on the best way to raise standards. Clark says, “I think the major issue is regulation. The Senate bill, and the White House bill, propose something that looks like regulation but has no teeth; and the House bills oppose anything that looks like regulation at all. So this major issue of cyber security -- protecting our country -- has come down to a matter of ideology.” He says, “There are two things -- potentially three things -- that are at stake: a lot of money being stolen through cyber theft; secondly, a lot of intellectual property being stolen, given to foreign companies that then compete against our own companies. And the potential for the third is cyber war, where a smaller country could attack the United States through cyberspace and do severe damage to things like the banking and finance industry. And we might not even know precisely who's doing it.”