Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Serious threats to the integrity of a country’s infrastructure are likely to require the resources of a state.⁵⁰ Software hacking is not enough; the hacker needs detailed knowledge about the physical construction of the systems he hopes to sabotage. When the Iranian nuclear centrifuges were compromised in 2010 by the Stuxnet worm, it required a coordinated effort by two technologically sophisticated nations, the United States and Israel. State-based cyber-sabotage escalates the malevolence from terrorism to a kind of warfare, where the constraints of international relations, such as norms, treaties, sanctions, retaliation, and military deterrence, inhibit aggressive attacks, as they do in conventional “kinetic” warfare. As we saw in chapter 11, these constraints have become increasingly effective at preventing interstate war.

Nonetheless, American military officials have warned of a “digital Pearl Harbor” and a “Cyber-Armageddon” in which foreign states or sophisticated terrorist organizations would hack into American sites to crash planes, open floodgates, melt down nuclear power plants, black out power grids, and take down the financial system. Most cybersecurity experts consider the threats to be inflated—a pretext for more military funding, power, and restrictions on Internet privacy and freedom.⁵¹ The reality is that so far, not a single person has ever been injured by a cyberattack. The strikes have mostly been nuisances such as doxing, namely leaking confidential documents or e-mail (as in the Russian meddling in the 2016 American election), and distributed denial-of-service attacks, where a botnet (an array of hacked computers) floods a site with traffic. Schneier explains, “A real-world comparison might be if an army invaded a country, then all got in line in front of people at the Department of Motor Vehicles so they couldn’t renew their licenses. If that’s what war looks like in the 21st century, we have little to fear.”⁵²

For the techno-doomsters, though, tiny probabilities are no comfort. All it will take, they say, is for one hacker or terrorist or rogue state to get lucky, and it’s game over. That’s why the word threat is preceded with existential, giving the adjective its biggest workout since the heyday of Sartre and Camus. In 2001 the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that “the biggest existential threat out there is cyber” (prompting John Mueller to comment, “As opposed to small existential threats, presumably”).

This existentialism depends on a casual slide from nuisance to adversity to tragedy to disaster to annihilation. Suppose there was an episode of bioterror or bioterror that killed a million people. Suppose a hacker did manage to take down the Internet. Would the country literally cease to exist? Would civilization collapse? Would the human species go extinct? A little proportion, please—even Hiroshima continues to exist! The assumption is that modern people are so helpless that if the Internet ever went down, farmers would stand by and watch their crops rot while dazed city-dwellers starved. But disaster sociology (yes, there is such a field) has shown that people are highly resilient in the face of catastrophe.⁵³ Far from looting, panicking, or sinking into paralysis, they spontaneously cooperate to restore order and improvise networks for distributing goods and services. Enrico Quarantelli noted that within minutes of the Hiroshima nuclear blast,

survivors engaged in search and rescue, helped one another in whatever ways they could, and withdrew in controlled flight from burning areas. Within a day, apart from the planning undertaken by the government and military organizations that partly survived, other groups partially restored electric power to some areas, a steel company with 20 percent of workers attending began operations again, employees of the 12 banks in Hiroshima assembled in the Hiroshima branch in the city and began making payments, and trolley lines leading into the city were completely cleared with partial traffic restored the following day.⁵⁴

One reason that the death toll of World War II was so horrendous is that war planners on both sides adopted the strategy of bombing civilians until their societies collapsed—which they never did.⁵⁵ And no, this resilience was not a relic of the homogeneous communities of yesteryear. Cosmopolitan 21st-century societies can cope with disasters, too, as we saw in the orderly evacuation of Lower Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks in the United States, and the absence of panic in Estonia in 2007 when the country was struck with a devastating denial-of-service cyberattack.⁵⁶