Since the September 11th tragedy, security has been foremost in the consciousness of pundits, politicians, and everyday citizens. The focus on it has only increased since the war on Iraq. By now we’re all familiar with things like Homeland Security and the terror alert system, and we’re hopefully schooling ourselves about what to do in a security emergency. But despite these efforts, an emerging security threat has arisen. The maturing of the Internet into a communications, business, and recreational tool nearly as ubiquitous and indispensable as the telephone has created a new set of concerns. An emerging class of terrorists — cyberterrorists — may be aggregating their resources and preparing to launch attacks to cripple the computer networks of American companies, organizations, and governments, hampering business operations and costing untold amounts to correct. What does this worst-case scenario mean to individual citizens? Not much; the people in charge are on the case. Thanks to the century-plus legacy of secure telephony networks, the government is well prepared to keep data networks as secure as possible. The telephone networks’100-year monopoly created not only a high degree and expectation of fault tolerance, but a climate in which it’s easy to justify spending whatever is necessary to keep the networks running in an emergency. To wit, Verizon had a call center in the Twin Towers that was so robust that only the immediate local area was affected after the September 11th attacks, so it’s unlikely that a cyberterrorist could do more than temporary damage to a very large data network. Full Story
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