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YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS you, nerd, seemed to be US Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff’s message to Silicon Valley in his patriotic keynote speech at the RSA Conference in San Francisco yesterday.

Chertoff even went as far as saying that future cyber attacks could be on the scale of the attacks suffered by the US in 9/11, a desperate strategy attempting to appeal to the nationalism and conscience of Valley workers, as opposed to appealing to their wallets. (But, hang on, aren’t most of them foreign anyway?)

In what sounded more like a military troop rally, the security chief told the auditorium full of Valley workers to stand up and be counted in America’s fight to secure the cyber highway, noting "The human and economic sacrifices from a cyber-attack can be devastating ... on par with what this country experienced on September 11".

Taking out a small onion and with tears of patriotism in his eyes, he begged the private sector to "please send some of your brightest and best to do service in the government", referring to a new inter-agency group (National Cyber Security Center) set up to act as an early warning system for major network attacks that would help the federal government protect its computer networks from organised cyber attacks. He theatrically added that joining up would be " the best thing you can do for your country".

Chertoff thought it best to instill terror in his yuppie audience about the potential chaos that could be caused if cyber attacks were to hit financial or government bodies, melodramatically stating "a single individual, a small group or a nation state can exact damage and destruction similar to dropping a bomb or explosives."

Noting that the US government took threats to the online world as seriously as those in the real world, Chertoff also outlined government plans to develop the equivalent of the "Manhattan Project" to defend US federal networks and national security interests from the big bad boogey man of large-scale cyber-attacks