It very much appears that the Information Age has presented us with, among many advantages and annoyances, two consistent realities: a pervasive sense of complacency based on our reliance on IT, and an awareness that concepts of achieving real security are more hopeful than possible. The entire landscape of interaction has shifted from the literal to the virtual so, as everyone knows, technical ability to access and manipulate codes translates to unimaginable risk, and on multiple levels. If the enormity of cyber danger is rarely discussed in ordinary settings, it is nonetheless very much on the public’s collective mind:
Fears are, in a word, sensible. Not long ago and within a week, a single security researcher was able to bypass codes and enter into a nuclear power plant’s operations and assume complete control (Grossi, 2008, p. 97). It requires little imagination to substitute an individual hostile to the U.S. as proceeding along these same lines. Then, that the U.S. is indeed at constant risk is powerfully evident in the 2008 incident when an infected flash drive was inserted into a U.S. military laptop at a base in the Middle East. In no time a malicious computer code uploaded itself onto a network run by the U.S. Central Command, spreading and undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, and easily permitting access to foreign powers (Lynn, 2014). This is the nightmare to homeland security, in that the most devastating attacks today emerge, not from vast army occupations, but from a little skill in the wrong hands applied to a vulnerability not recognized: “A dozen determined computer programmers can…. threaten the United States’ global logistics network, steal its operational plans, blind its intelligence capabilities, or hinder its ability to deliver weapons on target” (Lynn, 2014).
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It is in fact a bitter irony that advances in technology must – and exponentially – generate heightened levels of danger. For example, the U.S. Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS) rapidly evolved to the Wideband Global System (WGS) launched only a few years ago, and this reflects advances in technological security as directly enhancing vulnerability. Each WGS satellite is more capable than the entire, nine-satellite DSCS array, yet this same streamlining of capability enables heightened threat potentials, simply because the greatly amplified abilities of each satellite exponentially increase risk; in ;plain terms, there is more to access if the individual satellite is breached (Shaud, 2011, p. 39). As this risk exists, so too is there an ever-greater dependence on the systems themselves, so the public, the military, and the government are essentially locked into an arms race all its own; improve the technology and, somehow, conceptualize threats to it not yet devised. This latter effort is in fact the paramount focus of all Homeland Security agendas. The department’s Cyber Threat Division is constantly engaged in devising countermeasures, even as vulnerabilities are so often undetectable until they are breached. Technical support models for eliminating threats are created in an adaptive environment (Hayhurst, 2014), but that “adaptive” aspect essentially equates to attempting to foresee what is as yet unknown.
It is then hardly surprising that the DHS is integrally aligned with the U.S. Department of Immigration and the Secret Service, among other organizations (DHS, 2014). This is in fact the key to security today, in that the inherent nature of IT systems as interactive translates to the imperative that all planning be conducted in a similarly “networked” manner. In the Information Age, it is crucial that information be, not only protected from external threats, but shared. In a world where the IT expert able to access confidential banking information is then equally enabled to bypass military security protocols – as is the case today when so many systems rely on the same evolving technologies – it is more urgent than ever that preventing dangerous access be a truly universal effort.
