KERRY NATION: Understanding big news versus important news

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/08/2021 (1480 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a difference between heat and light. In a similar vein, there is a marked difference between jarring news and important news. This past week we experienced both — the big news was the unfolding Taliban control in Afghanistan, while the important news was U.S. President Joe Biden’s so-called summit with business and technology leaders pertaining to cybersecurity.

Please don’t misunderstand — the news out of Afghanistan is ugly and underscores the futility of the West’s efforts over a generation — in fact, more than a generation if one includes the American effort to provide weapons to the opposition during the Russian occupation of that failed state.

Afghanistan, not unlike other failed states including Somalia, Sudan and Libya, are endless morasses of misery. These are disastrous situations by any definition in which tribal and religious loyalties have overtaken the core principles that define our own societies including women’s rights, minority rights, political stability and the rule of law. We in the West have many failings, but I wouldn’t trade our situation for theirs.

There was no good time to exit Afghanistan, just less bad times. I’m personally not convinced that the U.S. chose the worst time, or even a bad one. There is no question the Taliban forces would sit back, conserve their strength, make clandestine agreements with tribal and community leaders in advance of the Western departure, and simply wait. This is precisely why the Taliban takeover was relatively bloodless — when the West was finally exhausted, it was inevitable they would leave.

The important news of the week was the White House summit about cybersecurity. For all the Afghanistan news, and it is dire, it will have limited impact on the lives of everyday Canadians. Conversely, when something like the Colonial Pipeline is hacked, as it was in May, this has the capability to hammer both the domestic and global economies.

State-sponsored and non-state actors (who enjoy protections from the nations in which they reside) perform cyber-activity to drive many outcomes — from profit to malicious tumult. The North Korean regime hacked Sony Pictures in 2014 to create havoc around the release of “The Interview,” a comedy that portrayed the nation in a less-than-flattering light.

That was no big deal.

The Colonial Pipeline hack literally crippled half the East Coast’s energy supply in May — that’s a very big deal. It created panic buying and gas shortages. It could have impacted airlines, transit or refineries. The company reportedly paid more than $4 million in ransom to end this hack.

In an increasingly interconnected world, with the “Internet of Things” becoming a bigger part of our lives daily, these hacks will become more frequent, not less so. In addition to being more prevalent, they will undoubtedly be more costly.

Consider, for a moment, how many infrastructure systems are connected — from health care to hydro, from nuclear power to water treatment plants. Our power grid is antiquated, and the cybersecurity is less than robust.

If you’re not worried about this issue, you ought to be.

Unfortunately, upgrading much of this will, in the short-term, fall to corporations. Private enterprise will inevitably upgrade its security, but as we have seen in the case of the two infamous hacks mentioned, and so many more, it most often happens after a costly episode.

We consumers will ultimately shoulder the cost of these upgrades — this is just reality. In the real world, away from social media and braying pundits, we must come to an understanding that stability and safety in our cyber worlds is at least as important, perhaps more so, than stability in far-flung locales like Afghanistan.