Detroit Free Press May 22, 2003
Michigan might ban high-tech weapon
Bills would add e-bomb to state's criminal code
By Dawson Bell
Michigan lawmakers took a tentative first step Wednesday to criminalize a bizarre high-tech weapon called the e-bomb, which sounds really scary but might not exist at all.
Acting on the better-safe-than-sorry model of legislating, the House Criminal Justice Committee voted unanimously to add e-bombs -- also called electromagnetic bombs -- to Michigan's criminal code along with dynamite and other explosives.
Using one, or possessing one with the intent to do harm, would be punishable by up to life in prison if someone died in the detonation.
Supporters of the measures, while acknowledging limited understanding of the technical details, said that is unlikely; e-bombs are theoretically aimed at disabling infrastructure like computer systems and electric grids, not harming people.
But Rep. William Van Regenmorter, R-Hudsonville, one of the bills' chief sponsors and chairman of the committee, said no one knows for sure what harm is likely because so little information is available about the weapons' capabilities.
At Wednesday's committee meeting, one witness used the movie "Ocean's 11," in which thieves use an e-bomb to disable electronics for a casino heist, as an example of its use.
The U.S. military is widely believed to have done extensive work on various kinds of e-bombs, and some experts are convinced a form of e-bomb was used in the war in Iraq.
John Pike, a defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, said a lot of research has been conducted but most of it is classified. Pike said he thinks a cruise missile-launched e-bomb may have been used on the first night of the war to disable Iraqi military communications systems. But the Pentagon has not confirmed it, he said.
Little is known about the potential for a devastating e-bomb attack by terrorists.
A form of the technology could be used to build one for as little as $400 that would be powerful enough to disable an entire city, according to one widely circulated estimate. Crashing computers, every electronic gadget and even automobiles within range, a terrorist e-bomb could "throw civilization back 200 years," a 2001 report in Popular Mechanics suggested.
Pike said he is somewhat skeptical of that scenario. If e-bombs were that devastating and that easy to construct, terrorists probably would have used them by now, he said.
Of course, they might have without anyone realizing it since computer and electrical systems failures aren't rare events.
Van Regenmorter and his fellow lawmakers said they don't know how to measure the threat. But if an attack occurred or wasplanned, law enforcement officials need specific tools to prosecute the offenders.
The bills, HB 4513 and 4514, were approved and sent to the full House.
Copyright © 2003, Detroit Free Press
