Our fragile Infrastructure

There is an excellent editorial by Matt Gurney at the NationalPost.com about the fragility of our infrastructure and how the best laid plans of governments and men go oft awry when reality proves more complex than anyone had planned for. Gureny argues that our infrastructure is more complex than anyone can possibly understand or imagine; that failures are inevitable; that restoration can be difficult; that recovery can take days, weeks or even months. We should all be prepared with supplies to care for our own needs, without power or water, for several days.

Here are some of the highlights from the editorial ...

Sometimes, huge and complicated systems (or even systems of systems) are brought down by fantastically tiny glitches that happen to strike at exactly the wrong place at the wrong time. [...] And so it was during the Northeast blackout of 2003, which cut electrical power for 55 million people in the United States and Ontario. That was eventually traced back to a combination of a computer glitch
and unusually hot weather causing power lines in Ohio to droop and make contact with tree branches that hadn’t been properly pruned. That was all it took to shut Toronto and New York City down.

[...] defending against this sort of thing is extraordinarily difficult. The systems that sustain our economy and civilization are too complex to be easily managed, or even understood by the trained professionals who run them. Returning to the 2003 blackout, the investigation into it revealed that even as the situation spiralled out of
control, utilities operators in Ohio had no appreciation that their electrical grid had become unstable and little understanding of how, as transmission wires overloaded and generators automatically shut down, the problem would ripple throughout their electrical system.

[...] Emergency preparedness is a good thing for governments to focus on. But [...] there’s ample evidence that governments are simply incapable of adequately tackling the complexities of disasters confined to even a single building. If something big ever happens — and sooner or later, something always does — we should all expect to be on our own for days, or longer. The systems we’ve built to support ourselves are just too complicated to repair any faster than that.

Espionage & Passwords

“Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody” - Mark Twain

Here is an unsettling story published in the Wall Street Journal, Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies.

Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and
former national-security officials. The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

As a computer programmer I understand that hackers would try to break into our infrastructure systems. But what concerns me is that they succeeded and could leave behind sleeping programs waiting for activation. “Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said.”

The WSJ reports, “Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.” I cannot for the life of me understand why a nuclear power plant should be accessible via the Internet. Perhaps workers want to push buttons from far away in case the plant starts to meltdown? I’ve worked at several companies with restricted Internet access. At one, there was no access, period. At two others they used VPN (Virtual Private Networks) to restrict access. VPN uses a token that displays a new “random” number every minute. To login I need my password and the current number on the token registered to me.

Sadly in many secure systems the weakest link is the human element. At one of my internships, the top executives (with the most data access) hated to memorize long passwords and asked for an exception so they could use two letter passwords. One hacker trick I’ve read about includes getting inside a company and then sitting down at computers where workers have left for lunch but left the PC logged on and connected to the company network. (Screen savers with passwords help protect against this). Another clever hacker passed out a survey to workers asking for names of pets, children, spouse, etc. He then checked to see if any worker had used a family name as their password; very common unfortunately. (A solution to this is requiring numbers and or special symbols in the password.)

Now it would be nice to think espionage would never happened but the WSJ describes two recent cases outside the US:

• In 2000, a disgruntled employee rigged a computerized control system at a water-treatment plant in Australia, releasing more than 200,000 gallons of sewage into parks and rivers.
• Last year the CIA told utility company representatives that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands.

Bottom LineTwo points I’d like to emphasize here.
1. Water or electricity could fail at a moments notice with a hostile attack. Do you have backup water and a power generator or means to cook/light without electricity? ABC News did a follow-up story called What if Russia or China Cut Off Your Electricity? It goes through a typical day showing how pervasive electricity is...

• Your alarm clock
• Your laptop (when the batter dies) & wireless router
• Your landline phone perhaps work but not VOIP
• Your hot water heater (if not gas)
• Your gas oven (most have an electric starter instead of a pilot light)
• Traffic lights
• Gas station pumps
• Frozen/refrigerated food at the grocery store
• Cash Registers, Credit Cards

2. Always use a strong password. Studies have shown that longer is better. Password hackers are well aware of L33T, the trick of substituting letters with symbols like 9ary or G@ry for Gary. So don’t think you are safe with a short but clever password. One easy password method is to use the letters from a favorite hymn, bible verse, poem, etc. For example “tbontbtitq” for “To be or not to be, that is the question” (but please choose something less obvious). You can strengthen this by creating a personal pattern where you always capitalize the same letters (say 2nd and 3rd) “tBOntbtitq”

Record Unemployment

"500 million Americans lose their jobs every month."- 2009, Nancy Pelosi (US Speaker of the House) [The US population is 306 million]

More bad economic news I’m afraid. U.S. job losses accelerate says Reuters. Job losses in January 2009 were 598,000, the most in 34 years, and the unemployment rate reached to a 16-year high.

"The economy is just falling into oblivion and it will get worse," - Greg Salvaggio, vice president for trading at Tempus Consulting in Washington

“January's sharp drop in employment brings job losses to 3.6 million since the start of the recession in December 2007” and "about half the decline occurred in the last three months." - U.S. Commissioner of Labor Statistics Keith Hall

"It is just another confirmation that we are in a deep and long recession, and the bottom is not even in sight. Manufacturing is incredibly weak -- it's going to be a long haul." - Robert MacIntosh, chief economist for Eaton Vance Management in Boston

Unfortunately the Democrat plan to throw money in all directions and hope that things are “stimulated” is unlikely to work. Here a few reasons why:

A new book, Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn't Work by James Delingpole, describes how the Stimulus plan & Obama look a lot like Tony Blair’s England from ten years ago. If we follow the British path, the US can expect

“a morass of sprawling government that will slowly start suffocating our economy, our liberties, and our culture… From the socialized medicine that will make us want to avoid going to the doctor even when our hand is on fire; to eco-fascism that will have us spending millions … to protect un-endangered, man-eating polar bears; to immigration non-reform that will leave us wondering what country we're living in anyway; to a further dumbing down of an already execrable school system, with more PC inanities, such as banning "competitive
games" because it might disturb children's self-esteem”

The article, Is Britain going bankrupt?, states “Alistair Darling [Chancellor of the Exchequer ] has had to admit that the British economy [today] faces the most sudden economic collapse since World War Two, and the worst budget deficit of any major country in the world”

Japan tried to spend it’s way out of recession with infrastructure projects. The New York Times (shock!) noted that Japan’s Big-Works Stimulus Is Lesson.

“Japan’s rural areas have been paved over and filled in with roads, dams and other big infrastructure projects, the legacy of trillions of dollars spent to lift the economy from a severe downturn caused by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. During those nearly two decades, Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world — totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy — while failing to generate a convincing recovery.”

Bottom Line

Will the US government learn from the mistakes of others? Don’t bet on it. Timothy Geithner, Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, “was a young financial attaché in Japan during the collapse and subsequent doldrums.” But he got the lesson backwards and believes we need to spend more and faster than Japan did!

“Economists tend to divide into two camps on the question of Japan’s infrastructure spending: those, many of them Americans like Mr. Geithner [Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury], who think it did not go far enough; and those, many of them Japanese, who think it was a colossal waste.” - NYT

Who do you think is right?