Clarion Content

We have two new stories that have crossed the Clarion's editorial desk in recent weeks that we feel are getting under reported in the mainstream media. Why isn't there more shock?

Part I: the CIA announces the agency has evidence that power grids have been hacked into!?! No joke, no exaggeration.

They refuse to give specific details about which power grids or even which countries have suffered this fate. They will only talk obliquely about what sounds pretty dramatic: about this hacking, "Criminals have been able to hack into computer systems via the Internet and cut power to several cities." What? Why isn't this front page news? This is just the kind of modern terrorism America should be preparing for, homeland security indeed.

This is just the kind of terrorism that the massive waste of resources in Iraq, human and financial, has caused America to take its eye off of. Saddam Hussein was never a threat to cut the domestic power grid. No one and nothing in Iraq posed this kind of immediate threat to America. Yet while the Administration is proposing $70 billion more to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan just through the end of this summer, the real threats to the United States go blithely unreported. Cyber-terror? Airport screeners? Vulnerable nuclear power plants? Who has time we're managing a civil war in the Persian Gulf, and another disintegrating state in Asia Minor? Repeat the CIA admits power grids are being hacked.

Furthermore, the announcement was a shock to many of the energy industry professionals at the security conference, "the disclosure came as news to many of the government and industry security professionals in attendance..."

The Clarion is anxious to point out there are often many more vectors on these kind of issues than the obvious. Not everybody is equally confident about these reports.

Either way the ambient fear level is raised. This type of threat, this is the nature of homeland security, not offensive wars.

Labels: Politics, technology