Islamic terrorism directed against US interests went on for decades before they managed to make the US sit up and take notice with the 9/11 attacks. I think a similar thing is going on with the cyber attacks from various national and criminal organizations. Right now they don’t amount to much. But eventually someone is going to pull off something that is going to make everyone sit up and pay attention.

From the Belmont Club….

America has been under foreign cyber attack before. But the Washington Post reports that recent attacks have become serious enough to issue a “rare public warning to the power and utility industry … a CIA analyst this week said cyber attackers have hacked into the computer systems of utility companies outside the United States and made demands, in at least one case causing a power outage that affected multiple cities.” Although at least some of the reported intrusions were by “computers belonging to foreign governments or militaries”, the targets this time were, significantly, commercial. “Cyber extortion is a growing threat in the United States, and attackers have radically increased their take from online gambling sites, e-commerce sites and banks, which pay the money to prevent sites from being shut down and to keep the public from knowing their sites have been penetrated, said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute.”

From The Village Voice…..

After 9/11, untold thousands of New Yorkers bought machines that detect traces of biological, chemical, and radiological weapons. But a lot of these machines didn’t work right, and when they registered false alarms, the police had to spend millions of dollars chasing bad leads and throwing the public into a state of raw panic.

OK, none of that has actually happened. But Richard Falkenrath, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, knows that it’s just a matter of time. That’s why he and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have asked the City Council to pass a law requiring anyone who wants to own such detectors to get a permit from the police first. And it’s not just devices to detect weaponized anthrax that they want the power to control, but those that detect everything from industrial pollutants to asbestos in shoddy apartments. Want to test for pollution in low-income neighborhoods with high rates of childhood asthma? Gotta ask the cops for permission. Why? So you “will not lead to excessive false alarms and unwarranted anxiety,” the first draft of the law states.

This rant went nicely with this week’s essay of the week.

Political endorsements are not usually worth much. By design they are vacuous attempts to pretend that this or that candidate truly is the ideal when anyone with half a brain knows that this is not the case. But Spengler’s political endorsement for president of the United States is sufficiently full of dry irony and considered real politic to be worth reading.