In Depth

Cyber Security, the Nuclear Threat and You: Cassandra's Guide to the 21st Century

Richard Power interviews Martin Hellman and mulls nuclear risk

By Richard Power

Page 6

Power: One might have assumed that laptops would be routinely encrypted by now.

Hellman: "Even more so back-up tapes, since the 1970s, I have been saying that back-up tapes should be encrypted. They are only occasionally accessed. Encrypting them if the key is stored someplace else is not a problem. With a laptop, people have to have the key. But given what has happened you would think that the cost-benefit trade off of the trouble with entering a key would be well worth it."

Power: Is cost the limiting factor?

Hellman: "No, it is the adolescent behavior. It is the difficulty human beings have in contemplating a world different from what they have seen. Even though they have read about these laptops being stolen, it has not happened to them. & Adults take responsibility for their actions, adolescents do not. 'I am going to go a hundred miles an hour and I am not going to kill myself.'"

Power: When I do executive briefings, or sessions for general audiences, I always start with a list of the top ten risks and threats, at the top of the list are nuclear proliferation and climate change and at the bottom of the list is cyber security. I don't do it to imply that cyber risks and threats are not problems worthy of treatment as national and even global security issues, but only to level-set, to say, 'OK, we are talking about cyber security, it is a very important topic, but let's keep it in perspective.' What is your thinking about the ranking of cyber security in the overall threat matrix? And about the resources and attention committed to it, are they commensurate, disproportionate, or inadequate?

Hellman: "The underlying problem for all of these [risks and threats] is this chasm between our technological power and our adolescent development. So there is an underlying theme to all of these which we need to get people to see, so that they recognize that they are not really dealing with ten different problems, they are dealing with one fundamental source of all these problems. Although it is also important to recognize that the list is not static. In 1976, when we published New Directions, automated teller machines had just come in, and the SWIFT network for transferring funds internationally had already come in, and in talks I gave I could see the potential for the day coming when buying a loaf of bread would be done with an electronic funds transfer; and, if that I happened, even if someone did not steal all the money, if they just crashed the system and brought it down, our economy could come to a standstill. If you look at the pace of our dependency on computers and communications, and project out, it is going to move up on the list. If you think about all of the potential damage that could be done now, power plants, nuclear power plants, weapons systems, it is getting harder and harder to isolate these proprietary computer and communications networks from the Internet; and people are finding ways to tunnel in. Cyber security could become an existential threat as we become more and more wired."