Beefing Up Our Security

I saw two disturbing stories this week on the news. Neither of these are even the story of what is going on in Myanmar, the country that I remember from global studies as Burma, which is simply awful.

The first story was that the Chinese are waging some type of cyber attacks on US infrastructure for the past several months. At first, I found it hard to believe that the country that doesn't even want Google would try to break into our military's computers. One good source article can be seen here. When I started to think about it, a large scale cyber attack could be as devastating as any military attack with many facets of our society affected. Imagine, our currency, our electricity, water, transportation and our communications going down all simultaneously, and we're rapidly approaching TV's "Jericho," even without the nuclear attack. I'm not sure what to do about this; maybe a Great Firewall around China? Do we go to the UN? Cyber attack them back? Increase our defenses? Clearly this is a problem that's not going away, but with much of our military's efforts directed at Iraq and Afghanistan, I seriously hope that we don't drop the ball on this one.

The other story this week, while in no way having anything to do with China (don't want to start the conspiracy theorists off...), was a perfect example of what can go wrong on a smaller scale. I'm talking about the outage at the Memphis air traffic control center. Realize that this outage was not at a tower, but at a center that controls the airspace over several surrounding states. When an ATT communications line went out, all the communications went with it, including the backup systems. Seriously, they didn't have a backup connection with another carrier? They apparently had 220 planes on their radar screens at the time, and some quick work by the air traffic controllers kept a disaster from happening. One news story said that the only means of communication was the personal cell phones of the controllers, which was used to call the airports and advise them of the situation. Once again, the flying public should be screaming that the whole system needs a revamp, not just for better on time performance, but for safety's sake.

As we can see how just the communications to one air traffic control center can disrupt the transportation of the entire nation, I can only imagine the disaster that could occur with a serious cyber attack. While it's clear we need some type of "national firewall" to keep our increasingly tech dependent country safe, then again, this is the Congress that doesn't even understand not to tax the internet so I don't give it much hope.

--Jonas