Net Force focuses on the potential for abuse of a technology that interconnects people from all over the world. In a few moments, someone in a VRC can zip to several different nations without ever leaving his or her home. In Net Force, a terrorist takes advantage of this situation to wreak havoc in many distant areas of the world while moving about anonymously among the millions of other users of the web. That computer terrorism is possible is already well established in the present era. Computer viruses alone can shut down defense computers and destroy home computers.

Already, Internet service companies such as America Online and Compu Serve have been shut down by viruses that overwhelm their e-mail services with bogus messages; a medium-sized computer manufacturer was driven out of business when a virus was actually shipped on its hard disks (consumers stopped buying their...