"It's highly unlikely that the United States will experience a crippling "digital Pearl Harbor," the CIO of homeland security says. "While this is a possibility, the probability is relatively low," Steven Cooper said in an online chat sponsored by The Washington Post. "We have done a lot in the federal arena to provide multilayered security for our digital environments and continually 'red team' our networks and applications to find vulnerabilities."
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• The government is moving to a single identity credential and smart card for physical and logical access to facilities and computers and their data."
The probability of someone crashing two passenger jets into the World Trade Center was probably fairly low as well, but if the risk is great enough even when the probability is low it's still a risk. It's good to know the US government is trying not to scare people, but I do hope that Cooper himself doesn't have a false sense of security.
About the Smart Cards, suspect he's referencing the SSP/Litronic CAC. Though there's much in support of simplfying access, if too many systems are accessible though a single card, there's a vulnerability. Cards can be left in readers and lost, and if the associated password/phrase is crackable or written down where an attacker can get it, that CAC could be the 'keys to the kingdom' in the wrong hands.