Infastructure Protection and Paranoia

[TruthMonger]

stewarts at ix.netcom.com wrote:
> At 03:41 PM 10/21/1997 +0100, Sandy J. Wong wrote on Cyberia-L
> >Buried in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal was a small three-paragraph article
> >mentioning that the U.S. may be vulnerable to a cyberspace version of the
> >Pearl Harbor attack.

  Why don't you phone up NSA and tell them that you made a Xerox (TM)
copy of the InfoWar plans left overnight at the bar/lounge at the 
Holiday Inn in Albuquerque last week?
  Let me know how it turns out for you...

> The story, in shorter or longer form, has been in most of the major papers.
> The InfoWar crowd has been lobbying and running conferences about this one
> for a couple of years, and it sounds like they're making political progress.
> The longer versions of the articles make the connection between
> infrastructure risk and the need for encryption to prevent attacks,
> with various FBI spokecritters talking about how we obviously need FBI access
> to all communications to ban InfoTerrorists.

  These rocket scientists can't figure out that our infrastructures
might not need all that much defending if our dearly beloved LEA's,
overt and covert, were not sticking foreign objects in the citizen's
anus, sabotaging other countries' infrastructures and economies,
assassinating citizens and foreign citizens, etc., etc.

> I've got mixed feelings about it; on one hand it seems like a bunch of
> Defense Department wonks trying to find a way to keep their jobs now that
> the world isn't threatened by Commies any more, but on another hand,
> some of them may have looked at the problem seriously and said
>     "<Expletive deleted>!  Disabling the country's critical infrastructure
>     really does look pretty easy!  Fixing it is probably our job."

  The world is threatened by the DOD...
 
> The recent San Francisco power failure appears to have been sabotage -
> somebody turned off a bunch of switches around 6am taking out 1/4 of the
> city's power for 2-3 hours; the papers don't say if it was just that one substation
> (in which case they should have been able to bring it up much faster)
> or whether it cascaded to a bunch of the other substations as well.
> Is it just another disgruntled employee?  An organized Ecoterrorist Conspiracy?
> Or a government provocation to reinforce their report's impact?
> In either case I'm sure the government will take political advantage of it.

  Yes, the question on everyone's mind is: "Was it the act of a lone 
madman, or an act of the same federal agencies who are putting assault
rifles in the hands of law enforcement agencies at every level, in 
preparation for...

TruthMonger