More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Tell that to the Easter Islanders and Anasazi Indians.”
It was an impossible game of catch-up against an adversary that only needed one hole to remain open among literally millions that an organization had to continually fix.
“Do you know they just restarted strategic bomber flights over the Arctic?” Richard said to Chuck. “Same flight patterns as during the Cold War?”
“The aircraft carriers, that destroyed village in China, DEFCON 3, train crashes, over a hundred million without power. This is no accident.”
Our grandfathers stormed the beaches of Normandy to protect our freedom. And now, because we’re afraid and not willing to accept personal risk, we’re giving up those same freedoms that they fought and died for. We’re giving away our freedom because we’re scared.” He had a good point. Damon nodded. “You can’t protect freedom by giving it away.”
It was amazing how quickly the body adjusted to the cold. Just two weeks ago I would have been complaining about this temperature, shivering, but now, with it hovering a few degrees above freezing, it felt almost tropical.
“If you don’t pay for a product, then you are the product.”
The tribal animal was always there, hidden just beneath our superficial lives of lattes and cell phones and cable TV.
And if everyone was to blame, was nobody to blame?
In the siege of Leningrad, the city’s population of three million had suffered through an event that lasted nine hundred days, whereas this one had lasted a mere thirty-six. Over six hundred thousand had died in Leningrad, while only seventy thousand had perished here. Only seventy thousand, but it could have been so much worse.
Now people all over the world were probably doing the same with the news about New York, just one item in the daily news cycle.
but once-in-a-lifetime events were happening in the world with unsettling regularity. Even with all the after-the-fact analyses, no one could quite figure out how it had all gone wrong at once.
But there was no similar protocol for dealing with cyberattacks. What was the blast radius of a cyberweapon? How would you know who had deployed it? The vacuum of rules and international agreements had been as much to blame as circumstances in creating the CyberStorm.
Life went on.
“Sometimes things break apart,” read the message, “so that better things can come together.” Below this was the attribution: “Marilyn Monroe.”
I certainly hoped so, for her sake, but a deep unease had settled into my soul.
The separation between the cyber and physical worlds was disappearing. Cyberbullying was just bullying, and cyberwar was just war—the true age of cyber would begin when we stopped using it as a descriptor.
I couldn’t believe I’d been so blind, so short-sighted as to believe she’d been unfaithful when all she’d been trying to do was better her life, and mine. The same delusional, single-track thinking had almost cost us our lives when I’d been unable to understand what I saw in Washington as anything other than a Chinese invasion.
He laughed. “‘Time’ is definitely the operative word.”
A threshold had been crossed, and the world would never be the same again. Despite all the handshaking and smiling faces on TV, there were already rumblings of new conflicts, and I somehow doubted that the lessons we’d learned would be remembered for very long.
When retreating from the city at the end of the war, the Nazis had leveled the entire urban center, destroying as many buildings as they could—Hitler was determined to wipe Warsaw off the map. Afterwards, however, its residents had rebuilt, brick by brick, effectively erasing Hitler the same way he had tried to erase them.
New York looked the same, but it wasn’t.
Looking into Antonia’s eyes, I realized my life had been saved too.
The first cyberattack can be traced back to the alleged 1982 sabotage of the Soviet Urengoy–Surgut–Chelyabinsk natural gas pipeline by the CIA—as a part of a policy to counter Soviet theft of Canadian technology—that resulted in a three-kiloton explosion, comparable to a small nuclear device. Titan Rain is the name the US government gave a series of coordinated cyberattacks against it over a three-year period from 2003 to 2006, and in 2007
In 2011, the McAfee security company revealed a series of cyberattacks, that it dubbed Night Dragon, against Western critical infrastructure companies, most specifically against the energy grid. This is significant because of the Aurora Test conducted by Idaho National Laboratory in conjunction with the Department of Energy in early 2007. In this test, a 21-line package of software code, delivered remotely, caused a large commercial electrical generator to self-destruct by rapidly recycling its circuit breakers, demonstrating that cyberattack can destroy physical infrastructure.
