“How long until it’s a snot nosed teenager ushering in the dark ages?”
“To destroy a dam physically would require “tons of explosives,” Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff said a year ago. To breach it from cyberspace is not out of the question. In 1998, a 12-year-old hacker, exploring on a lark, broke into the computer system that runs Arizona’s Roosevelt Dam. He did not know or care, but federal authorities said he had complete command of the SCADA system controlling the dam’s massive floodgates.
Roosevelt Dam holds back as much as 1.5 million acre-feet of water, or 489 trillion gallons. That volume could theoretically cover the city of Phoenix, down river, to a height of five feet. In practice, that could not happen. Before the water reached the Arizona capital, the rampant Salt River would spend most of itself in a flood plain encompassing the cities of Mesa and Tempe — with a combined population of nearly a million. “
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/12/AR2006061200711_pf.html
I'll bet most Qaeda cyber-terrorists were trained in American Universities... or maybe all....