With just a few keystrokes, a terrorist's strike may be just a modem away. Wall Street takes a dive and throws financial markets into chaos.
Banks lose their electronic records and explosive international tensions ignite.
Airplane traffic plunges disastrously into mountainsides and oceans. Municipal water districts shut down, leaving entire cities dry. Such incidents regularly provide plot lines for Hollywood movies. But a presidential commission now formally predicts such incidents could be all too real in the near future. That's because as networked computers expand their control over the nation's energy, power, water, finance, communications, and emergency systems, the possibility of electronic attack and catastrophic terrorism becomes increasingly possible, claims the panel.