Americans More Worried About Cybersecurity Than Terrorism 266
TheGift73 tips an article discussing a new study (PDF) which found Americans are now more worried about cybersecurity threats than they are about terrorism. Here's Techdirt's acerbic take:
"Well, it looks like all the fearmongering about hackers shutting down electrical grids and making planes fall from the sky is working. No matter that there's no evidence of any actual risk, or that the only real issue is if anyone is stupid enough to actually connect such critical infrastructure to the internet (the proper response to which is: take it off the internet), fear is spreading. Of course, this is mostly due to the work of a neat combination of ex-politicians/now lobbyists working for defense contractors who stand to make a ton of money from the panic — enabled by politicians who seem to have no shame in telling scary bedtime stories that have no basis in reality."
Re:fearmongering (Score:4, Informative)
Show me the questionnaire (Score:5, Informative)
I don't trust executive summaries of polling data; I want to see the entire questionnaire so I can understand the context in which the questions were asked. I'd bet that if people were asked an open-ended question about the "problems facing our country today" cyberterrorism would be lucky to get a 1% response. Here are the top items from the most recent New York Times/CBS poll [nytimes.com] released yesterday:
Economy and jobs 62%
Federal budget deficit 11
Health care 9
Same-sex marriage 7
Foreign policy 4
Immigration 2
Other/DK 4
I don't see terrorism of any sort on that list.
Even if we accept the findings of the survey, what is most striking in the results is the substantial increase in respondents who say they are "not concerned" about the threats asked about compared to a year ago.
Moreover at least one question has nothing to do with IT, the one about respondents' ability to "meet essential financial obligations." For more relevant questions, solid majorities report being only "somewhat" or "not concerned" about the security of online shopping and banking, computer viruses and spam email, and their own personal security.
The IT media has a habit of touting these self-serving studies by organizations like, in this case, Unisys as somehow providing an "objective" view of public opinion. Puh-leeze.
Re:fearmongering (Score:5, Informative)
So why do we teach evolution as the only answer?
Because evolution has actual evidence. And probably for the same reason we don't teach people about invisible magical pink unicorns living on mars in schools.
Re:fearmongering (Score:4, Informative)
There is not a single shred of evidence to prove there is not a creator. Not one. So why do we teach evolution as the only answer?
It's impossible to prove the non-existence of god(s), pink unicorns, etc. The burden of proof lies with those asserting that God is real to, well, prove it.
Evolution has evidence. Creationism does not. Therefore, creationism should not be entertained in a science classroom except as an illustrative example of pseudoscience.
Re:fearmongering (Score:3, Informative)
The beginnings of the universe have very little to do with the theory of evolution. Yet, for some reason, you keep bringing it up in this argument, as if it makes your assertion that creationism (meaning the belief that every living thing on the planet was here at the beginning of the universe, or the planet, or whatever) belongs in a science classroom. There is absolutely no evidence that that belief is true, so the argument is "no, it doesn't". And then you come in with philosophy debates. Now, whether the philosophy should be studied is a different question. It probably shouldn't be studied in a science classroom, because science classes teach what humanity has learned with the scientific method. A belief in a creator doesn't change the fact that creationism makes no sense from the evidence we gathered, and therefore should probably not be teaching it to children.
You're trying to argue whether a Creator exists, with philosophical references. Everyone else is arguing whether we should be teaching about that Creator in a class where there being a creator or not shouldn't matter, since we can't prove it scientifically either way.
Re:Take it off the Internet? (Score:4, Informative)
You can't take the power grid off the Internet. You know why? Because of (ironically) reliability. Let's look at Texas, which is governed by ERCOT. ERCOT facilitates sharing between the different power utilities, as well as energy trading. Much of this (and more in the future) is facilitated by communications about load, actual generation and available reserve generation capacity. These three numbers change more frequently, dramatically and unexpectedly than you might think. An industrial plant fires up a furnace...and whammo, suddenly a utility has 25MW of load show up out of nowhere without warning, and they have to push their boilers to produce more power to keep up. (If load and generation get out of balance, very bad things happen...but frequency regulation is a story for another time). If a plant trips because of some mishap, then suddenly a bunch of generation drops off the grid. If it's a big plant, then that utility may need to draw power from a neighbor to keep up, at least until they can restart the plant (or bring demand generators online).
Without these interconnections, the ability to respond this way greatly drops off. So it's a situation where the overall grid becomes more stable, but at the cost of providing a degree of interconnectivity that makes it more feasible for an attacker to go after it via cyber attacks. A lot is being done to manage the vulnerabilities and risks, mostly under the NERC CIP regulatory standards. There's a nugget of truth to the fearmongering, but taking it all off the Internet is not even remotely realistic.