Posted on 11/08/2009 6:44:09 PM PST by presidio9
Nothing has ever changed the world as quickly as the Internet has. Less than a decade ago, "60 Minutes" went to the Pentagon to do a story on something called information warfare, or cyber war as some people called it. It involved using computers and the Internet as weapons.
Much of it was still theory, but we were told that before too long it might be possible for a hacker with a computer to disable critical infrastructure in a major city and disrupt essential services, to steal millions of dollars from banks all over the world, infiltrate defense systems, extort millions from public companies, and even sabotage our weapons systems.
Today it's not only possible, all of that has actually happened, plus a lot more we don't even know about.
It's why President Obama has made cyber war defense a top national priority and why some people are already saying that the next big war is less likely to begin with a bang than a blackout.
"Can you imagine your life without electric power?" Retired Admiral Mike McConnell asked correspondent Steve Kroft.
Until February of this year, McConnell was the nation's top spy. As chief of national intelligence, he oversaw the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Few people know as much about cyber warfare, and our dependency on the power grid, and the computer networks that deliver our oil and gas, pump and purify our water, keep track of our money, and operate our transportation systems.
"If I were an attacker and I wanted to do strategic damage to the United States, I would either take the cold of winter or the heat of summer, I probably would sack electric power on the U.S. East Cost, maybe the West Coast, and attempt to cause a cascading effect. All of those things are in the art of the possible from a sophisticated attacker,"
In the first case, we had "Former State Department Official" Jim Lewis talking about (and to give him credit, the man knows what he's talking about) a foreign power hacking into CENTCOM in 2007. This was all useful information, but then Lewis added that the Bush Administration covered the whole thing up, because it didn't want to admit that it had been "rolled." This is obviously a significant charge, and Kroft should have stopped him there and asked him to expand a bit. Instead, he moved on and let it hang. I was intrigued enough to Google Jim Lewis, and was not suprised to learn that his time at State was in Trade Policy. Then, in the H.W. Bush admistration Lewis worked in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs under Assistant Secretary (wait for it) Richard Clarke. It was Clark who got him interested in cyberterrorism, and got him transferred to NSA. Either Steve Kroft didn't know this, or he thought it wasn't important enough to mention when he failed to address Lewis' accusation against the Bush Administration.
Later in the segment, Kroft interviewed Rep Jim Langevin who is a Democrat on the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Unconventional Threats. Langevin handled himself nicely until he dropped this bombshell:
"I look at this as, like, a pre-9/11 moment. Where we identify a problem, we identify a threat, we know it exists, we know it's real, and we don't move quickly enough to fix the problem."
I'll cut him some slack on this one, but not Kroft. Were Kroft a competant journalist (even a liberal one), the next question to a congressman needs to be "Are you saying that the Bush Administration did not do enough?" No matter what the man says, the story gets better. Kroft chose to let it hang again, implying that there might be some truth to that opinion. After all, Langevin is in a better position to know than Kroft, right?
I'll close by pointing out (I'm not the first one) that there were no terrorist attacks in this country in the seven Bush years after 9/11, but we've just had a terrible one less than a year into this new one. Of course I don't blame Obama, but the Democrats always seem to be keeping score with these sorts of things.
I'll also note that Langevin is billed first and formost as a pro-life Democrat who is also disabled, and he has a fairly good record on abortion issues, getting a 70% rating from National Right to Life Committee. However, like a lot of confused individuals who have a personal stake in stell-cell research, he is also a big supporter of funding there. He was appointed Hillary Clinton's special advisor on stem cell research.
Somehow we managed to have a working power grid before the rise of the internet. Considering the havoc that would ensue if the grid went down, it makes me wonder why we simply don’t go back to controlling the grid without using the internet?
The answer, of course, is that we like to wait until chaos forces us to do what we should have done beforehand. It’s the American Way.
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