Weapons of Mass Disruption: commuters get a glimpse of the guture

At the same time, the 106 mile regional subway system, which transports 750,000 people in the Washington Metropolitan area fell victim to a recurrent computer glitch. Riders couldn't use their debit cards to pay for their trips. Many had to leave the stations and find other means to reach their destinations. This was at least the third occurrence in the last month for some.

But were those faulty systems further damaged by outside forces?

On August 14, 2003, at approximately 4:15 p.m. EDT, a massive widespread power outage occurred throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and Ontario, Canada. 45 million people in eight U.S. states and 10 million people in Ontario were left in the dark. It was the biggest blackout in history.

It was blamed on FirstEnergy Corporation's failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area and an electronic flaw in General Electric Energy's Unix-based XA/21 energy management system.

But quietly, intelligence officials discussed the possibility that the Chinese People's Liberation Army gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems and brought down the grid.

A growing chorus of U.S. intelligence and Cyber authorities are revisiting the possibility the Chinese may have been involved in 2003, and other cyber glitches in the U.S.

Lee Hamilton, former Vice Chair of the 9-11 Commission says, "Some day, somewhere, sometime, we're going to have a massive cyber attack which will disrupt activities in this country. You can almost bet on it."

And when it does happen, "if you're able to take down part of the electricity grid, pretty much everything fails," says the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency James Woolsey. Furthermore he adds, "You don't have water being pumped, you don't have sewage being pumped, you don't have deliveries to grocery stores, it's pretty difficult to figure out what does work under those circumstances."

To put it into context, Woolsey says, "Imagine a world that is not pre-1970, pre-internet, but imagine a world that is pre-1870, pre-electricity."

First the local and regional chaos begins to set in says, John Bumgardner Research Director of the independent, non-profit U.S. Cyber consequences Unit. "If you start having a day or two without power it's an inconvenience. You starting getting into a week, you start getting into a major inconvenience. Everything starts to collapse after about a week."

Then, former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell says, the bottom falls out. "Think about the consequences of no electrical power in the USA. I would argue in a short period of time it would have devastating consequences for the globe --loss of confidence in the U.S. dollar."

That's the reason why Pete Earnest, Director of the International Spy museum and his staff has launched a series of speakers events designed to educate the public about the vulnerability of the electrical system to hackers. "This is one of the things we're all living with and what we depict here is the nature of the threat and we take the possibility that it could bring down portions if not the entire electrical grid," says Earnest.

A critical piece of the effort at the Spy Museum is a video and graphic exhibit called "Weapons of Mass Disruption."

"I think people need to be aware that cyber attacks are harder to understand because you can see them. Its one thing to have people fly a plane into the building and cause deaths. But these cyber attacks are taking place every single day and in many cases we don't know who is behind them," says Earnest.