“The current blackout is a result of a cyber attack”
“It will happen”
Ominous words from the National Geographic channel and their premier movie this weekend. Not really sure how the news reporter can still report given the aforementioned blackout, and also not sure why toilets cease to work when you lose power, but the point is taken. We are all at the mercy of roving mobs of vigilantes because of the dangers of a cyber attack.
I am counting the days until Western developed countries encourage people to duck and cover, like they did during the Cold War in the event of nuclear attacks, to avoid the damage from a massive cyber attack. Constantly, the security industry, both conventional and internet protection based industry, keeps trumpeting the coming cyber doomsday. We see it in this show, we see it in NBC’s Revolution, and we see it in government testimonies. The fear of digital security has even creeped into the Obamacare dispute.
The National Geographic channel offers its own take on the issue with American Blackout which premiered on Sunday the 27th. The story is familiar. America is unprepared. Malicious actors seek to destroy our way of life. Since we are so digitally dependent, a massive cyber attack that destroys the grid will irrevocably alter our way of life. Sorry little girl, Daddy is not coming come, ever, because the internet is not working. I remember a time when the National Geographic channel would actually produce real informational content, not disaster porn like the Weather Channel.
Have we collectively lost our minds? It is as if we cannot remember a time as recently as 20 years ago; when no one had fast internet service, when we had to look up information in encyclopedias, and you know, actually talk to people. Has nearly a decade of no obvious and serious threat to the homeland produced a sense of mass hysteria where we are actually convinced that we fear the thing we trust the most? Most assume that the cyber arena is an area of vulnerability. That more connections make us less secure and more vulnerable, but if anything, the internet era has actually demonstrated that we place profound trust in cyberspace. We give forth our details, connections, and memories with little question. This buzzfeed examination of what happens when you sign up for Facebook in 2013 really illustrates this point. We seem compliant with giving digital sources access to our most prized and sacred possessions, our computers.
I have been joined by a few other scholars in advancing the point that the coming cyber doomsday is an inflated threat. A forthcoming Journal of Peace Research article I have with Ryan Maness further demonstrates that of the cyber “attacks” (we prefer the term incidents and disputes) that have been witnessed in the last ten years, most have been of very low severity and impact. The greatest cyber attack of our time, Stuxnet, has already been debunked as an important event in that evidence actually shows that Iran was able to increase uranium production during the period of attack, not decrease it as suggested by security sources.
There needs to be a reevaluation of what we call the security paradigm. The basic idea is that we are insecure in this world and threats are out there. Our reaction to these threats will either save us or doom us. My perspective is that our reaction to these threats can actually make the issue worse in that we set off the security dilemma. Our reaction to fears can make these fears a reality by encouraging other states to build the same cyber capabilities. The last decade has seen a profound overreaction to the terrorism threat. We will see the next decade as evidence of a profound overreaction to the cyber threat. What threat is next on the list? How will we overreact to it?
Sorry little girl, Daddy is not coming home because Twitter is down. Now go hide under your desk, but don’t check Facebook, because its dead!
My strong suspicion is that the feeling of insecurity that people feel here is ‘ontological’. As hesitant as I am to explain anything through psychoanalysis, I certainly know that I feel an almost primordial dread at the thought of my internet going down, because so many of my habits and standard routines for the day involve being online. It’s only when I ‘bracket out’ these things through special activities such as camping that I am likely to feel comfortable with prolonged offline-ness.
Does this make me pathetic? Oh, quite probably. But it doesn’t surprise me that as people increasingly locate themselves in cyberspace, the threat of a cyberattack seems increasingly threatening. I also think this explains some of the reactions to the Snowden leaks: we’re used to thinking that online social networks are a secure and safe place, so we feel sort of betrayed.
Very true, there should be required off the grid boot camps. I am used to this having moved so many times recently that I often go weeks without internet or reliable phone service. Its actually liberating and productive.
Good point. I think another dimension to this concerns the imagined futures that societies hold and the way that certain vulnerabilities call those into question. Not only is the internet an integral part of
many of our daily routines, it is also central to how we imagine our possible futures as a society and community. The ability to create social networks easily, to share information and to (potentially) organize around those connections has become a key trope in how popular culture imagines the future, and it has been elevated in importance to such an extent that it now represents, in many ways, “the key” to realizing
progressive social change in the future.
To put it differently, the internet has become so central to how we imagine our future and the potential for progress it holds that the
prospect of losing it is not only dangerous but apocalyptic. We literally cannot imagine a meaningful future without the internet, so, instead, we imagine a post-apocalyptic wasteland when confronted with the prospect of its loss. This suggests that in order to counter this kind of threat inflation, we need not only a more restrained response to these threats (as you suggest), but also better and more varied stories that we can tell about possible futures.
Or at least, a more realistic sense of just how robust the internet is and how little it is threatened by cyber attacks, except in a localised and temporary way.
While the NatGeo show deserves criticism for engaging in cyber doomsday scenarios for ratings, your position of cyber skepticism is equally w/o any basis in fact. If you’d actually like to be informed about threats to the Grid, attend the S4 SCADA Security conference in January and speak to any of the attendees who deal with attacks to critical infrastructure on a daily basis and have a deep understanding of where the vulnerabilities are, how they can be exploited, and what the results may be.