Marble Falls        The internet is now regularly making all the lists of top ten inventions in civilization contributing to our modern world.  Who can deny it?  Who among us can now live without it?  Artificial intelligence is contending for a place on the list, to both applause and anguish.  The concern is how it might be used against us, rather than being a tool that serves us.  That’s all well and good, but it’s worth noting how our good ol’ pal, the internet is being used against us on the regular as well.

Certainly, there are accusations and some very solid proof that whole hacker teams employed by Russia, North Korea, and China, both rouge and state supported, put the US and other countries and their systems at risk.  Elections of course are part of this, but seeing the way Ukraine’s infrastructure was attacked, or how Israel used phone pagers against Hezbollah are all wake up calls.

One of the byproducts of Trump’s war with Iran has been their tactical ability to spread the theater of the war to countries around the Middle East.  Recent attacks were sufficient to once again have Trump step back from bombing threats based on our area allies pleading to give peace and negotiations another chance.  Though the US is currently outside Iranian drone and missile range, we are also seeing that Iranian hackers may be trying to bring the war to American soil.  Well, maybe not soil, some much as water and other critical infrastructure.

Reports indicate that as many as 30 water systems in Minnesota may have been hit with similar reports from Michigan and South Dakota. Hackers are “remotely tampering with some water systems’ internet-connected programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, causing loss of water pressure and flooding.”  Cyber experts speculate that it is likely that this kind of disruption is also possible throughout the country, because the weak link is “the brand of PLCs targeted — Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley — [which] is widely used.”  US water systems are uniquely vulnerable and have resisted regulation and warnings. “Of the roughly 151,000 water plants in the United States, about one-third service residential communities year-round. But only about 420 water plants participate in WaterISAC to try to improve cybersecurity across the water sector.”  Iran’s role is speculative and likely, though not definitively proven, although most of this problems coincidentally date to Trump’s war’s beginning.

Exploiting internet tools isn’t limited to war of course.  Police use of Flock camera license plate readers for nefarious and personal use is also widely known, as another example of the internet used against us.  The amount stolen from bank accounts and credit cards is astronomical.  The list is long and perhaps endless.

We can’t live without water, money, or the internet among other things.  For most of us, going off the grid would be a fool’s errand, since our jobs are also dependent on these things.  Having governments that bend like leaves in the wind to private business pleas to resist expenditures on citizen protection in order maximize profit dates way before the invention of the internet, but this very economic system that prioritizes us all as product, rather than priorities for protection, means our internet friend is enabling our enemies and holding us in peril as often as helping us along our paths.