The gentleman-urbanist confronts cyber-threats

(swiped from sadefenza.blogspot.com)

I am surprisingly old, faithful readers, old enough in fact to remember the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union possessed enough nuclear weaponry to destroy all human life multiple times (as if once wouldn't be bad enough?). My response to this ever-present danger was to ignore it, because there was seemingly nothing I could do to change it, except to sign a nuclear freeze petition, which seemed and seems rather ineffectual. According to former Assistant Secretary of Energy Thomas P. Grumbly (2021), there are still too many nukes, and I'm still ignoring them, all 13,400 of them.

(L to R) Paul Ness, Alexis Diediker, Aaron Voss, Colin Gage

I was thinking about my life under nuclear threat while attending a panel on cybersecurity that was part of the Cedar Rapids Gazette's Business Breakfast Series. The panel--Paul Ness of Foliance, Alexis Diediker of Pro Circular, Aaron Voss of True North, and Colin Gage of Farmers State Bank--discussed "Lessons Learned from a Global Tech Outage," specifically the CrowdStrike incident of July 19. Do you remember that? I'm ashamed to say I'd already forgotten it. Maybe if I'd been flying anywhere that day?

July 19 was caused by faulty software, not malefactors, though there are plenty of malefactors out there. All panel members are involved in some way or other in protecting firms and other institutions from the effects of hacking and other dangers of our cyberconnected world. (Diediker has the intriguing job of penetration tester i.e. she tests organizations' systems for both technical and human vulnerabilities.) As a non-technical gentleman-urbanist, I don't think I'm unusual in leaving cybersecurity up to our friends in information technology, except to complain about multifactor authentication and security awareness training they make us do. Math is hard, and I've got urbanism things to do. (Worth pondering: If Google, which owns Blogger, ever disappears, this blog is disappearing with it.)

One could say, correctly, that I am not paying enough attention to the threats to my own as well as my organization's security posed by cyberthreats. After all, one tech outage can ruin your whole day. The panel called for better communication between "the basement and the boardroom" (Voss's phrase) and for that matter, the rest of the organization as well. Gage referred to "a balancing act" between connectivity and security, and while the technically trained are best equipped to enact that balancing, everyone should understand the basics of how that balance is struck.

If we can under-attend to risks, we can also over-attend to them. One of the factors that has driven the suburban development pattern for the last eight decades has been the perception that urban centers are dangerous and it is wise to spare no expense to get away from them. That has increased social isolation, individual health problems, and traffic crashes (which kill many more people annually than do guns). We can build fences, buy guns and/or post signs saying we're not afraid to use them, take pictures of everyone who passes by, buy larger and larger vehicles, and never go outside--I've encountered all of these in Cedar Rapids--but at what cost to our common life and our own souls?

After the panel, a fellow at my table who'd found out I teach political science asked if there wasn't a danger that the Federal Reserve Board has a plan to use digital currency to enable the government to control our lives? Maybe there is. I can't prove there isn't. But as an entrepreneur, he is in far more danger of a financial catastrophe from a health problem or a cyberattack than he is of the government controlling his life. To deny the government a role in economic stabilization or health care access is to play a far riskier game.

There's a psychology to risk assessment that I only dimly understand. Allowing for phenomena like discounting future impacts, or greater concern for potential losses than potential gains--two common human traits that bedevil urbanist initiatives--it's not easy to predict why some people find some risks terrifying while ignoring or discounting others. I know I've become less self-protective over time, and more concerned about human connection, and I don't even understand why that is.

Maybe the first challenge is to understand the nature of risks. For one thing, as long as we're alive we can't avoid them. We can try to achieve an informed understanding of them, and to give them the attention they deserve, and not overlook the tradeoffs involved in over-focusing on certain risks at the expense of others. (Risk reduction always involves tradeoffs. My Uncle Dwight used to tell a joke about a fellow who quit smoking and replaced the habit with chewing toothpicks, until the guy died of Dutch elm disease.) We can understand the ethics of self-protectively pushing risks onto others. Mostly we can keep in mind the goal of living the best life, which as Aristotle reminds us, is life lived in common.