After the shock of 9/11 passed, and the horror of the US response came to light, the thing that really truly gives me a knot of anxiety is that we are not as a nation having the discussion of how to respond to the next attack. So it seems we are doomed to fuck up in our response all over again.
Then when you hear that the US Intelligence community is just WAITING for the next attack to take advantage of the public it just confirms what any thinking person already knows… that there are a LOT of agendas ready to be pushed in a vulnerable moment for the country.
I used to think it would be another physical attack. But now it seems all the more likely that it’ll be a “Cyber 9/11.”
Such an attack could manifest as the loss of services (such as power outages, online banking closures, credit card network failures, internet access failures) and it could include unrecoverable direct financial loses in the markets and for individuals.
The result of the attack will be awful, to be sure, but our reaction could easily be even more awful. Fear and human bias could be used to drastically change the digital and internet landscape in this country and thereby the world.
There’s no arguing that 9/11 was horrible. That is self apparently true. However, one hurricane or a single month of car crashes in this country can cause an equal amount of loss of life and property. And we don’t respond to a hurricane by spending a trillion dollars on war. Or by torturing prisoners.
The same will be true of the “Cyber 9/11.” We will all be awe struck by the number of dollars lost or the number of people without power… whatever it is. But with perspective, we would see that more citizens lose power to thunderstorms in the summer or lose their dollars to natural down-swings of the DOW Jones.
But taking a step back for perspective is a really tough thing to ask hurting, afraid people to do. And the agendas pushed through the corporate media will completely undermine any effort to think critically about the situation.
Our best bet is to talk this stuff through before it happens.
