[...]Former National Security Adviser Richard A. Clarke suggests a thought exercise in his hit book Cyber War: imagine you are the assistant to the president for Homeland Security. The National Security Agency has just sent a critical alert to your BlackBerry: "Large scale movement of several different zero day malware programs moving on Internet in US, affecting critical infrastructure."

As you get to your HQ, one of the DoD's main networks has already crashed; computer system failures have caused huge refinery fires around the country; the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control center in Virginia is collapsing, and that's just the beginning.

"The Chairman of the Fed just called," the Secretary of the Treasury tells you. "Their data centers and their backups have had some sort of major disaster. They have lost all their data." Power blackouts are sweeping the country. Thousands of people have already died. "There is more going on," Clarke narrates, "but the people who should be reporting to you can't get through."

This sort of scare-the-children prose has become something close to the norm, complain George Mason University Mercatus Center researchers Jerry Brito and Tate Wakins in a new working paper about what they see as the real problem—"threat inflation."

"The rhetoric of 'cyber doom'," Brito and Watkins write, "lacks clear evidence of a serious threat that can be verified by the public. As a result, the United States may be witnessing a bout of threat inflation similar to that seen in the run-up to the Iraq War. Additionally, a cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War. This complex may serve to not only supply cybersecurity solutions to the federal government, but to drum up demand for them as well."

The paper's title is "Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy." As that last paragraph suggests, these authors see a clear and present parallel between the cyberwar debate and the rhetoric of the Bush administration after September 11, 2001.