A devastating digital disruption: Not if, but when

In the original “Star Trek” series is an episode called “A Taste of Armageddon.” (The entire story, plot, etc. can be found here.) The short synopsis is as follows: “On a diplomatic mission, the crew visits a planet that is waging a destructive war fought solely by computer simulation, but the casualties – including the crew of the USS Enterprise – are supposed to be real.”

In the episode, two planets at war with each other have a treaty: They must kill the “victims” of every simulated attack. Push a button, a computer simulator shows an “explosion” in a certain region, and voila: The “casualties” are mandated to report to disintegration chambers for execution. No bloodshed, no destruction of infrastructure, none of the hardships of war. Just a lot of dead people. So neat! So tidy! This had been going on for 500 years.

This episode came to mind this week when I read a piece in the Blaze entitled “Tech meltdown: Could our digital infrastructure bring us down?”

Our world is now so technologically connected that a mere push of a button can bring down … well, everything. The CrowdStrike outage of July 19 was a superb example. One mistake, and suddenly banking, transportation and logistics, medical systems, news organizations, sporting events, manufacturing, supply chains, package deliveries,government services, retail and e-commerce, education, and much more were dead in the water. Everyone was reporting the “blue screen of death.” It took some industries weeks to recover.

As the Blaze noted, “Our adversaries are undoubtedly studying what happened on July 19 and planning accordingly. Any attack against our critical infrastructure would unfold much like the CrowdStrike outage: One failure triggers a cascade of system failures. Together, those overwhelm our ability to respond, causing even more damage.”

Our global strength – efficiency – has become our greatest weakness. The interconnectivity that allows someone in rural Maine to purchase a product made in Australia and receive it within a matter of days is a staggering achievement. Because generations of people have grown up with this kind of anticipated efficiency, its disruption is not just annoying, it’s devastating.

Every critical municipal infrastructure – clean water, sanitary waste disposal, medical care, food distribution, etc. – depends on connected computers to operate. Disrupt that interconnectivity, and society is brought to its knees.

This is the kind of vulnerability that will be exploited by our adversaries. After all, why bother engaging in messy, bloody wars when all you have to do is push a button? That’s why an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapon detonated in the upper atmosphere is postulated to be so destructive. No one would be killed – directly – but it could conceivably take down every possible modern convenience. We may as well report to the disintegration chambers for execution at that point.

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As FBI Director Richard Wray said during a congressional hearing six months ago, Chinese hackers pose a very real threat to the American people: “PRC hackers are targeting our critical infrastructure; our water treatment plants, our electrical grid, our oil and natural gas pipelines, our transportation systems, and the risk that poses to every American requires our attention now. China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real world harm to American citizens and communities.”

Yet despite these dangers, the push to “smart-ify” everything continues. The creepy “internet of things” has become more widespread. At the individual level, people embrace convenience and efficiency at the cost of being unable to do those things manually. At the societal level, businesses and utilities embrace efficiency at the cost of manual backups that would prevent utter collapse in the event of a glitch. In other words, both at the societal and individual level, redundancy is sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.

It’s only a matter of time before that lack of redundancy will catch up with us. The CrowdStrike failure was just a foretaste of what can happen.

And yet, both at the individual and the societal level, we refuse to do anything about it. It’s always “someone else’s problem” to fix. Experts have pleaded with the government for years to harden America’s grid, but such pleas fall on deaf ears.

This, I speculate, is what is in store for America. No natural disaster can duplicate the devastation a comprehensive cyber-attack could have on our nation’s infrastructure. At this point, I don’t know if there’s anything that could be done to prevent it, except to try to keep one step ahead of the cyber-terrorists.

Among the conspiracy theorists, of course, a comprehensive cyber-attack is being deliberately planned by the WEF or some other elite bureaucracy. The COVID pandemic failed to achieve its goals of bringing about the New World Order and kill off a good chunk of the peasantry, so some other means is necessary to cause devastation and build a utopia from the ashes of Western civilization. A “cyber-pandemic” would achieve that goal nicely.

“Network attacks are difficult to independently trace, which means anyone can initiate them and anyone can be blamed afterwards,” notes this opinion piece. “With the increasing tensions between western and eastern nations the chances of an attack are high. And corrupt government officials could also trigger an internet crisis and blame it on foreign enemies – either to convince the public to go to war, or to convince the public to accept greater authoritarianism. I believe a cyber-attack is the next most likely global disaster. We weathered covid and defeated the draconian mandates. The economy is in the midst of a stagflation crisis but the system is still operating. But what if the next ploy is a complete shutdown of the web and a fast moving financial collapse?”

Whether a cyber-attack is a planned Black Swan event by the WEF to bring about their globalist goals, or merely the act of a hacker bent on creating havoc for purposes of obscure gratification, the effect is the same. I believe this isn’t a matter of IF, but WHEN.

Interestingly, typing “preparing for a national cyber-attack” into a search engine yielded articles on many government websites – secretservice.gov, Ready.gov, CISA.gov, whitehouse.gov, dhs.gov, fema.gov, etc. – before listing various news articles on the subject. But the question remains how these agencies can effectively help individual people affected by a cyber-attack. It’s why even government websites urge people to take individual responsibility for their situation.

To this end, it’s worth examining what we, as individuals, can do to avoid metaphorically reporting to the disintegration chambers for execution. I’m willing to listen to some ideas.

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