The Cyber Threat
If our society and media were operating in a more rational, problem-solving kind of a way the story linked above might have gotten widespread coverage and analysis all week in the news.
It hasn’t. It should. Just as much as unfolding, fast-moving climate changes and challenges should get way, way, way, way more news coverage and societal attention. Either of these huge big risks could lead to very complicated things that we need to deal with as a society.
The YouTube story linked above from CBS News essentially says that China has been in US infrastructure systems for at least five years. At least. There’s more information from the related Congressional hearing, and also on federal websites. If there’s interest, next week I can pull together more information on all of this.
A key takeaway from this story is that China might — or rather, appears to — have the capacity to disrupt, stop, or otherwise interfere with US infrastructure. That means everything from the power grid to rail lines to aviation to supply chains and how we get our meds. Critical infrastructure encompasses a lot, and it’s called “critical infrastructure” because we need it to maintain a functional society. When it’s disrupted, we get a mess. When it’s disrupted, we often get illness, death, economic damage, property damage, and community damage. It’s bad.
In the interview above, former CISA Director Chris Krebs notes that the risk isn’t just disruption for the sake of it, but that it could be disruption to cause psychological damage and societal chaos. Which is < checks notes > also what Russia has been working to do to the US with a lot of success. A fragmented, disrupted society weakens a country — and this country is the world’s most powerful superpower. If Russia or China could weaken us, they could seize more power/assets/people/countries themselves.
Krebs does note that the US electrical grid — like much of our infrastructure — is not nationwide and fully integrated, so in the case of electrical infrastructure disruption, we are more likely to get regional damage and/or impacts if cyber attacks on the power grid were to occur. We can extrapolate that sort of thing to much of our infrastructure which is local or regional. We’ve got some national critical stuff, too, though.
The other thing that happens with critical infrastructure is that the interdependencies lead to cascading failures when there is a disruption in one place. For example, you can’t run water and sewage plants if the electrical grid is down. You can’t run grocery stores and gas stations, either. And so on.
I say all of this because we’re not working as a society to take on these big huge problems like this cyber risk or like absolutely certain damage that will come from climate change because we’re so paralyzed and divided by political chaos in the form of an authoritarian movement. It’s not good, and that in itself is causing cascading effects because we’re not dealing overall with these big huge threats.
News was leaked this week of another big threat on the horizon — or rather — above it. Russia is apparently working on some sort of aggressive big bad threat to satellite capabilities. A Republican Congressman leaked this classified information, which is another whole topic, and now we know a tiny bit officially.
So far, it sounds like the risk here from this new threat sort of aligns with the other two subjects mentioned above — that we could have damage to interdependent, interrelated critical infrastructure that we rely upon for parts of our society to function.
We Have Options For Navigating Increasing Disruption
We’re not powerless.
We could take political action to help shift this country to actually take on some of this huge problem-solving stuff that we need to be doing by getting us to a more functional government.
We could also be working on seriously building resilience, strength, and coalitions right where we live to help us navigate the increasing disruptions that are very likely to impact our society and soon if not already. This stuff is looming like a 50-foot tsunami and we’re sort of holding our breath as the ocean keeps pulling outward to make a bigger metaphorical wave. But we’d be better off if we took it all seriously and got started in real ways and not just by doing window dressing.
What This Nonprofit Offers To Help
So the work here at this nascent nonprofit is meant to help us do short-term political change to help hold democracy together like in 2024, and long term work to help us be more resilient. Our 5 Things are totally designed for all this. The picture below shows what they are, but this link can tell you more.
We need good tools and real plans to help with the unfolding chaos. That’s what we’ve put together here at Shift the Country.
Anyway, we’re getting going March 1 with twice weekly Zoom calls to ramp this up.
We’ll be starting by working out through existing groups working anywhere/everywhere to make change. We’ll also be putting a guide out along with idea lists for things people can do where they are. We’d like to grow a cadre of folks who can spread the word and help more people and groups use this framework.
I’ll be doing individual calls (schedule one here) with folks who would like to explore ideas or start working on putting pieces together.
Also, for what it’s worth, I’m not just casually chatting about all this. I worked with critical infrastructure resilience and security in some form the entire 11 years I worked in homeland security in the Washington, DC area. The work here at this nonprofit grows out of that experience and is designed to address the current and predicted risk landscape.
Also also, we just got baseline funding through the 2024 election to grow this work here so there is much more to come. I’ve been getting ducks in a row behind the scenes and tech and stuff but we’ll be ramping up action here on this Substack and in our other spots over the next few weeks.
For now, I’m heading off to do family stuff for the weekend.
Take care of yourself and your people. We need us. Keep the faith — we’ve got good people.
Let’s go.