See what happens when I have a hippity-hoppity internet connection? I miss things like THIS: “War game reveals U.S. lacks cyber-crisis skills”.
“Scene: The White House Situation Room.
“Event: A massive cyber attack has turned the cellphones and computers of tens of millions of Americans into weapons to shut down the Internet. A cascading series of events then knocks out power for most of the East Coast amid hurricanes and a heat wave.
“Is the assault on cellphones an armed attack? In a crisis, what power does the government have to order phone and Internet carriers to allow monitoring of their networks? What level of privacy can Americans expect?
“A war game, sponsored by a nonprofit group and attended by former top-ranking national security officials, laid bare Tuesday that the U.S. government lacks answers to such key questions.”
From my own experience with the landmark NORAD-Northcom Homeland Defense/Civil Support Study, I can tell you that cyber-defense emerged as the primary concern. In my opinion a massive cyber-attack is morally (and perhaps physically) the same as a military attack, and should be treated as such. Policy and law have not kept pace, unfortunately, but hopefully there have been advances in the last year. We’ll see. Sobering as they are, it’s good that we hold these events to highlight our vulnerabilities. Keep ‘em coming.
