MSP53 [] The Fragile Earth

This is a download from BFM89.9, the Business Station. Recent natural disasters have started to show how delicate the web of technology that holds the world together actually is record sculpture box mat heritage. But what if those natural disasters were followed up by a cyber attack from hostile nation? On that happy note, it's fun Friday and it's time to ask Matt to explain.

Matt, where are we starting? Natural disasters or cyber attacks? Hey Jeff and welcome back. This is one of those weeks where a bunch of stuff has come together.

So I was listening to a recent episode of the 99% Invisible Podcast earlier this week which focused on Puerto Rico's electricity grid. Now I know that might not sound fascinating but actually it was. The podcast is adapted from a long form article in WIDE magazine and it's about the year long struggle to get Puerto Rico's electricity grid back online to get the homes reconnected after Hurricane Maria in September last year. So we're facing increasing numbers of these extreme weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes as well as natural disasters.

We had the recent earthquake in Indonesia. Of course I was flooding in Italy, you were just there to experience that and that's just a few of the things that are happening. Is it climate change? Honestly, I don't want to go into that area because personally I think it is.

That's my key point but that's not the purpose of the podcast. So I don't want people to switch off because they don't like my take on things. So today it's actually about our infrastructure and how delicate that infrastructure is and how much we take things for granted. So let's start with Puerto Rico.

Okay, well we've heard a lot over the past couple of years about how easy it has been to hack into electricity grids and other critical infrastructure projects. Now it's perfectly possible to imagine parts of a grid being ruined so turbines in a power plant being run in a way that might physically damage them and that kind of thing. Those are all the kind of things that you can do with these cyber attacks. But most plant has physical overrides so you could potentially send surges down individual lines that might damage them or upset substations or lines down line.

But from what I understand most hacking of these systems is for short term disruption for days, weeks or months if they really get lucky. It's the command and control mechanisms rather than the infrastructure itself. Yeah, it's not about bringing the towers or the cables down. You're not collapsing water pipes but weather events are causing that kind of physical damage.

So we're seeing this kind of non-fortunatous convergence of conditions or potential conditions at a time when we're increasingly putting these systems online and we're trusting them to automate the control systems. So we're in this situation of growing geopolitical uncertainty by countries are prepared to meddle in one of those affairs and the planet is having its own series of wobbles in terms of these extreme weather events and of course natural disasters. And you see the potential for the two to collide for hurricane to be followed by a hacking operation? Well when we say phrases like cyber war it can feel a little bit remote.

We think of wars as being something out in the open. A country A declares war on country B and everyone starts throwing missiles at everybody else. You know there are battle plans, there are goals, it might be winning territory. But the current reality is a bit more nuanced.

Cyber warfare has a definite economic edge as well as a political one and of course that's not new. War has always been about money and power but the more information we put online the more that data can be weaponized either for or against the people who are supposedly on our team. Can we tell who's on our team anymore? And that's another really good question.

You know one of the things that's come out of the Jamal Hashogid disappearance and murder in Turkey is the extent to which Turkish security services had the Saudis under surveillance. Now obviously their surveillance capabilities were far greater than the Saudis assumed. And Turkey is still being coy so they're releasing a steady drip feed of information but it seems likely that Turkey's security services were listening and possibly even recording video inside the Saudi console in Istanbul and possibly inside the console general personal home too. And either the Saudis were communicating on unsecured telephone lines or those same security services had compromised the telephone communications too.

So of course Turkey and Saudi Arabia are arrivals in that region. They have competing visions of how the future there should be shaped so you would expect them to be conducting surveillance on each other. And you mentioned that this kind of warfare is more nuanced. I've read a lot of reports by technology and defense analysts over the past couple of years that make the case that the superpowers are in this pretty much permanent state of continuous cold cyber war.

And it's really hard to figure out who your friend and who your foe is especially when it comes to things like industrial espionage. We often hear that phrase, you know, dual use technology which is used to put blanket bans or sanctions on certain types of product or technology. The most obvious example is the centrifuges that can be used to refine radioactive materials into more fissile and weaponizable form. And this is where you remind us that all technology has multiple users.

Exactly. I'm not going to use my fork example today. I've been watching a lot of violent TV shows the last couple of weeks. Yeah, that always makes me really happy.

So let's look at the life saving power of the humble Tourniquet. Now, where would the walking dead be without Tourniquets? You get bitten by a zombie, Tourniquet. You get shot in the belly, Tourniquet.

You get your head ripped off. Tourniquet. But equally, I've seen shows recently where those same strips of clothing or twine have been used as garrots to strangle people. So sorry to get in person right now.

But that same simple piece of technology can end a life or save a life. It's the same with a car. It's the car to take an injured person to the hospital. Or you can use it to ram and kill an injured someone.

It's the same device. It's life saving, but it can be life taken. You know, we're very far away from Puerto Rico right now. I mean, when we talk about cyber war, we think about strategic goals.

But what if the goal is a simpler one? No open conflict, just constant attempts to make your enemies weaker. So you steal as much patented technology as you can and you feed it into your own industries and research institutes. You mess around with infrastructure to cause disruption and delay.

So it doesn't have to be sustained or extensive? It doesn't have to be much at all. You can jam the signaling gear on railways and other public transport. During Russia, for example, you can switch off the sensors or monitors in water plant.

Even small levels of contaminants can disrupt water supplies for days on end. It's all these frequent but minor things that spread chaos and reduce public confidence in the people in the institutions that govern the country. And those things are very hard to distinguish from the normal type of mechanical malfunctions or human error events that we experience on a regular basis. And you think that natural disasters can provide cover for these kinds of attack?

Well, especially when cyber attacks are opportunity driven, when the goal of them is to create chaos. So one of the most interesting things about the probes in recent elections worldwide is that by and large they haven't favoured a particular side. So yes, right when candidates have often benefited. But the goal is often a lot simpler than some kind of ideological regime change.

It's about discord. You aren't going to spend so much time looking at what I'm doing if you're too busy bickering amongst yourselves. So coming back round to Puerto Rico, we're looking at what can happen purely in terms of natural disasters. So this is about how long it can take an advanced society to recover from, whether impacts, without even having to think about the additional threat of cyber assault.

I'm glad we finally reached the Caribbean. This has been a really long flight. It's not bad analogy. Actually, people often look like they're suffering from jet lag after they've spent an hour with me.

So when Hurricane Mariah hit Puerto Rico last year, it was the third and most devastating of a series of storms that had backed up the island over previous months. The islands underfunded and under-resourced utility industries was still trying to repair the damage from the previous storms. And the island has a slightly weird anomaly. Most of the power is generated in the south of the island.

Most of the people live in the north. And across the centre is a ridge of mountains. Which means that all the cables and towers have to go up and over the mountains. Yeah, and Hurricane Mariah knocked a big chunk of that capacity out.

So in Malaysia, we get local power out to us recently often. And I'm only speaking anecdotally here, but whenever a storm knocks the power out where I live, we're usually reconnected within a handful of hours, in fact, very often within an hour. And let's not forget, Malaysia experiences pretty wild weather as a matter of course. We get strong winds, we get really heavy rain on a regular basis.

So as much as we complain about the utility companies, the infrastructure here is actually remarkably robust. But then again, it doesn't have to stand up to hurricanes and typhoons and earthquakes. No, exactly. I mean, do you remember a few years ago when a fishing trawler severed one of the head to see internet cables that connected half of Southeast Asia to the west?

And I think that was in the sea somewhere near Taiwan. But our broadband outages lasted for a week or we had really trickling services. And all of that was just to repair one cable, you know, admittedly in the middle of the ocean. But Puerto Rico had pretty much its entire electricity infrastructure knocked out.

And despite it being part of the USA, or at least protectorate, it took a year to get everyone back onto the grid. When we come back, we stay on the ground in Puerto Rico. We'll be right back, BFM 89.9. Beyond frivolous matters, BFM 89.9.

The business station. And we're back. It's fun Friday with Culture Post-Mamotage. Before the break, we were looking at the damage that natural disasters can do to our modern way of life and how those disasters can be hijacked or exacerbated by cyber war.

So let's reiterate, Puerto Rico wasn't under cyber attack. No, and it didn't need to be because infrastructure is a little bit like dominoes, the hurricane damage property, ravaged entire cities and villages, it blocked or swept away roads, tens of thousands were made homeless, water supplies and sewage were disrupted, food distribution was hampered and of course the island went dark. Unless you had your own generator. Well, obviously many people had their own, but generators are only useful as long as you have fuel to put in them.

Roads have to be clear to transport petrol and diesel. So Puerto Rico was a bit like a microcosm of what could go wrong in a modern society. In order to get the power on, you have to clear the roads. To clear the roads, you need fuel.

To get fuel, you need clear roads. So you get into these really weird Catch-22 situation. And without power there are no communications. And we totally forget what happens when the power gets out.

I mean, you were telling me about what happened to you in Italy. So a little bit of flooding and where was your phone? It was gone. It was emergency calls only.

I was using a local sim. I couldn't reach out to anyone. I had no idea whether do I need to get out of this town because everyone was stuck in their room in their houses, but no lights were there. No electricity was out.

And no shops and restaurants. No shops or open. So you couldn't get food? Yeah, I didn't know water, no food.

I was stuck in a room that was pitched dark even at 2pm. And I had no hotel call lying to reach out to the outside. Well, I didn't even know if my neighbors were actually in their home or sleeping at 2pm. I was just alone.

Alone in dark. But that's the thing. And you can't do all the things you take for granted. You can't charge your phone.

There's no electricity powering the tower towers as you experience. So even when they have backup systems or generators, you have to regularly go and fill them up. That requires clear roads. So you've got no phone calls.

You've got no internet texts. No WhatsApp. Walkie talkies will only work for as long as you can keep them powered, which is why I find it funny on shows like The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead. Characters keep finding walkie talkies years after the apocalypse that still have a charge in the batteries.

They flip the switch and they talk to their friend. It still looks surprisingly. But that's why I'm saying whereas in Italy, it didn't work out. No, hospitals can't function either.

No. And those are the other things we forget about disasters. The enormous pressure they place on public services. So you have people who are injured in the storm itself.

You have people with existing medical conditions, who are worseened by poor housing, poor sanitation. Babies are struggling to cope with the heat because there are no fans of air conditioning. And if the roads are blocked or the ambulances don't have fuel, then people can't get to the hospital. So minor conditions start to become major ones.

And also we forget that a lot of modern medications and drugs need to be refrigerated. On top of which you have this situation. You've got no power. So you have to face those heartbreaking and brutal decisions where you have to prioritize some patients over others.

And I guess this might be a good thing. I guess some people can't get to work. Well, manpower shortages were a chronic issue in Puerto Rico. And look at KL.

How many of us live close to where we work? Very few. So you block the roads and people can't get there. Now that's fine if you're a barista or a radio producer.

The world is probably not going to end. But what if you're a surgeon or a water engineer or an ambulance driver or a fisherman or a farmer? If you can't get to work, then you can't help. So this is the kind of situation where being a short order cook in a diner can really have an impact on people's lives.

If someone had gone into a restaurant, you would have been able to eat in Italy. Just little things like that. So if you're not cooking, if you're not doing your job, people may be suffering as a result. There was one restaurant or cafe that was opened the next day.

Only one in a town of five small towns grouped together. Only one was open the next day. It was just really... I imagine the queue for a table was just really bad.

And also if you're not working, you aren't earning then. No, exactly. That's another factor. So in developed countries, we're taking on increasing amounts of debt.

Our savings will generally only cover us for a few weeks. So imagine facing mortgage payments for a house that's just been swept away by a hurricane. And we're so used to electronic payment systems. We rely on them.

How many of us now pay for stuff like a bottle of water with a card or an e-wallet? But in a disaster, all those payment systems are going to be offline as well. Actually, for the next two days, after my trip, they just didn't accept credit because the electoral systems are down cash only. And even then they had problems with giving cash back because they never had enough cash to begin with.

And I'm also imagining that you took less cash with you this time because when you went to Sweden, you took a little cash. I love my lesson. And you couldn't use it. But here, it's the opposite way around.

There are worse things than waiting in line at the bank for cash. That's if you can get to a branch that's actually open where staff can make it in, where that branch has power and an internet connection to actually check your balance, where that branch can be stocked and supplied with cash, as you said, going into stores. They didn't have the change to give you. So things are bad enough when it's just nature in the mix.

Throw in some DDoS attacks on news and government information sites, a bit of radio jamming or even some spoof radio broadcasts or TV or net channels. And you have the recipe for chaos. It's still a year to get the lights back on. It's a very long time.

I was going mad even after 18 hours. Yeah, exactly. So, and of course it happened as a gradual thing. Cat power came back in stages to different parts of the island.

And sometimes actually formed their own power teams. They repaired their own poles, their own lines. And they coordinated with utility companies to hook them back into the grid. Other times were helped by NGO specializing in solar power.

So they were able to meet basic needs while the grid caught up with them. In fact, the wild piece and the 99% visible piece both mention how Hurricane Mariah defied some of our darker predictions about what happens when the power goes off. That we will be eating our neighbors' kids after three days without power. Yeah, in my case, the neighbors' kids would probably have been turned into cat food after the first gust of wind.

But no, I think this is my favorite part of the story. Puerto Rico didn't descend into chaos. People were short of food and water and medicine. But they helped each other out.

They didn't turn on each other. That is actually very true. Again, I saw that happening the day after the thunderstorms in Cicotere. And your kids were actually sweeping the roads and elderly people, young people, some even brought in their own mini tractors because the roads were too small.

Whereas we're often told by politicians that if the power goes out, we're three days from the Stone Age. Well, I guess we're not volunteering for rescue and salvage. Steve's will pop up. And not just for a few days.

Some of the projects took weeks and months. People really went above and beyond. So for example, if we go back to the island's power company, Breper, as I said, it was underfunded and understaffed. It had no social media presence and no real way to inform the public of what was happening.

So it fell to company employees like a guy called Jorge Bracero to start posting raw data about what they were doing at work, explaining why things took so long and what kind of challenges they were facing. And I think sometimes we take for granted how difficult it is to repair things. Yeah. I mean, one of the things we definitely lost sight of is how to be patient.

Got you. A couple of months ago, there were repairs to the water treatment plant in my area. And we were without water for just a couple of days. And we hadn't stopped up because we don't really read local news so much anymore.

We don't get newspapers. It was doubly unpleasant as I had a stomach upset. Well, we did manage to eke out the water in our tank. But the day the water was supposed to come on, I was rushing around the house like an idiot turning the taps on every few minutes to see if any H2O was actually surging its way through the pipes.

Because in a smartphone world, you fix everything by just rebooting it. Exactly. So it took people like Jorge Bracero to point out that you actually have to hike into the mountains with heavy equipment on your back to get to some of those towers. If you were lucky, you could maybe get a four-wheel drive up there.

But if the roads and paths were swamped with fallen trees or eroded by landslides, then you'd have to do it on foot. In one video, Bracero posted a worker was actually balancing on the skid of a helicopter to try and repair a cable. Bracero himself was running a three-story boiler running up and down constantly. And if the turbines tripped out, which they often do when you're trying to bring parts of a grid online, it could take him an entire shift another seven hours to get the boiler back online.

So these were dirty, dangerous jobs that were done with little thanks and in really unpleasant conditions. What should the world have learned from Puerto Rico? Or any of this is a natural disaster? Well, for all the devastation and the unfortunate deaths and the misery, what happened in Puerto Rico or the Carolinas or Indonesia, those were actually imperfect storms.

Those places were all decimated by what nature threw at them, but they weren't actually under attack. No one was actively trying to make those situations worse. But they could have done potentially quite easily. But they could have done potentially quite easily.

So a few dark Facebook posts about minorities and terrorists being smuggled in under cover of the disaster. Rumors that femurs rescue centers were actually concentration camps for the United Nations. You know, all the usual kind of conspiracy nonsense. It's strange to look at how fragile our way of life is.

Because we take so much of this for granted, you know, there's always someone who'll tell you something like, oh, well, it couldn't happen here. And next week, you see their obvious disappearing to a sinkhole. But back to your statement, yes, you do hear people say we live on a fragile planet. Actually, we don't.

We live on a very robust planet that has a fragile ecosystem. And the biggest problem is that we live an even more fragile and perilous existence within that ecosystem. And we seem to be chaining ourselves to ever more fragile and kind of remote systems. So your advice is that we should all pack a bug out back and start prepping for the apocalypse and then eat our neighbors kids.

You know, my brother-in-law is one of your neighbors. Right. I can probably get you his kids freezer ready if you're interested. I don't think we should be preparing for disaster in that way.

We might actually do a show on in the future about technology and the the proper industry because there's kind of an interesting corollary there. But we do have to make our societies and communities more robust. So we've outlined one natural disaster, Hurricane Mariah, and the instability that came from the results of that storm, a perfect storm where you have nature and a concerted cyber assault doing their worst. And that state of instability could be extended almost indefinitely.

You might be repairing your hardware, but those command and control systems might remain vulnerable or offline. So you could be trying to get things back online and command signals could be rewritten or delayed as parts of the operation or parts of the network rather are brought back into operation. And that can then trip things out and start damaging the hardware all over again. And you think we should give more thought into the kind of systems we install?

I think we need to pay more attention to cybersecurity in general. You know, we should be looking at which systems we wire up to one another. It's great to pull data, but you have to ask yourself, are you just building a massive highway for hackers to take over all of your critical infrastructure? And I think we should be looking at systems like electricity and water.

As though it's inevitable that they're going to be hit by a storm or a flood or an earthquake. As we move into this era where the climate is less stable, we should be paying more attention to the structure of that infrastructure. We should be designing it in ways that it continues with various parts knocked out. We should be looking at ways for those sections to be repaired and brought online more easily.

And we need to figure out how much all of that is going to cost because it's not going to be cheap. I love Netflix. I spend hours watching cat videos on Instagram and I have no intention of spending the twilight years of my life in a cave, eating 20 year old dins of cat food. Man, I'm a teacher there talking about the fragile earth or in other words, the darker version of my recent trip to Italy.

What could it be? What could it be? If you want the lighter version of my trip, just go to my Instagram instead. We'll be right back with Geek Squad after this BFM 89.9.

Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, BFM 89.9. The Business Station.