Obama's conundrum: how much cyber power to use

Washington

FOR years now, the Obama administration has warned of the risks of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor", a nightmare attack that takes out America's power grids and cellphone networks and looks like the opening battle in a full-scale digital war.

Such predictions go back at least 20 years, and perhaps that day will come. But over the past week, a far more immediate scenario has come into focus, first on the back lots of Sony Pictures and then in back-to-back strategy sessions in the White House Situation Room: a shadow war of nearly constant, low-level digital conflict, somewhere in the netherworld between what President Barack Obama called "cyber vandalism" and what others might call digital terrorism.