Counterfeit Electronics as Weapons of Mass Disruption?: Some customers may consider knockoff clothing and watches to be good values, but counterfeit electronics can be devastating. What would happen, then, if some criminal element bent on wreaking havoc and inducing public panic were to intentionally introduce such a bogus product into the electronics supply chain—malfunctioning printed-circuit boards in a critical air-traffic-control system, say, or faulty parts into automobile braking systems? Even the suggestion that such an act had occurred might set off a wave of recalls and might ground suspect systems.

What form could such weapons of mass disruption take? One possibility is a time-delayed defect, designed to cause a product to fail after some predictable period. Such products might pass an initial qualification test and remain functional for a time, but eventually they would degrade and shut down. A clever counterfeiter might also deploy a Trojan horse, containing embedded software or hardware programmed for disruptive purposes. For example, you could program a cell into a microprocessor to malfunction, with the triggering event being a change in the logic state of some registers. Or the microprocessor could be programmed to release faulty information, such as erroneous Global Positioning System or altimeter readings in an aircraft.

Or imagine products hardwired to fail or otherwise do damage when they receive an external signal; this type of mechanism is used in many of today’s roadside bombs in Iraq. A product could also be engineered to allow spying; circuitry inside a personal computer, for example, could surreptitiously collect data and then send the information periodically to a remote receiving station.

If all this seems far-fetched, keep in mind that variants of such disruptive technologies are actually used by legitimate companies now to remotely monitor the health of computers and other electronic systems. That said, just because something can be done doesn’t mean it will. So far, at least, those hell-bent on social disruption seem content with more obvious means of instilling terror.

—M.P. & S.T.