 Okay, we're back, we're live, we're fresh back from the walk market in Chinatown where we did a live show with our live view of fabulous. We talked to everybody in the market, what I've seen, think that goes everywhere, deep into the bowels of Chinatown. And then back to Ethan Allen, with likable science. Hi, Ethan. AJ, nice to be here. So you were looking at the MIT newsletter and you found some interesting articles about cyber war, what did you find? So there's been this intriguing piece that you may have heard about in the news, it's just sort of now surfacing. It turns out apparently Russia has been practicing cyber warfare, refining their techniques for several years, primarily using Ukraine as sort of their testing ground for all kinds of techniques and approaches and consistently refining them, making them more and more sophisticated, not just knocking out, turning off lights for a while, but taking out whole systems, greater and greater systems with more and more sophistication, taking them out at different levels. In some cases, the fringes of the system, other cases right out of the heart at time is doing it sort of anonymously at other times, literally taking control away from the operators of the system, who are sitting there suddenly and their local machines don't work, but they're watching the mouse scroll around on the screen turning off switches. It's kind of a bad movie. It is, it's truly frightening, but apparently this has been going on, and they are doing this, they have been practicing it, they have seen so far no real serious repercussions to it, so they're just continuing to move ahead. And the key part is there's a so-called Trojan software that allows you to import other software into computers, and that has already widely infected US systems, including systems of our power grids and things like that. This malware now lives in these systems, so they'll be able to slip more stuff in whenever they want. Yeah, well this reminds me of the methodology used by the Stuxnet virus back a few years ago, which was a joint project between the US and Israel, and they wanted to hit the centrifuges in Iran and blow them up somehow and render them useless, and so they found a software that would go around the world, but it would rest in a certain kind of Siemens controller made in Germany that they knew were used in the centrifuges, and it went hither and yon all over the place everywhere, but it didn't do anything until it got to the Siemens controllers in Iran, and then it did some damage. Like that it essentially turned up centrifuges way past their top safety point, and they burned themselves out, basically. Well, yes, that was true, but they also slowed them down, so it was, you know, you couldn't figure what was going to happen. It was clever. Unfortunately, A, they found out, well they found out the hard way, I mean the Iranians did, and then they hired a bunch of cyber war people themselves in order to rebuild that system, and now I don't think we can hack into it very well. But the point in all of that is that you can have malware that goes around the world, and it can sleep or do nothing, and then it can do targeted things in one local region, one local company, one local room, you know, the whole world to one room, the whole world to one Siemens controller, and that's what we're hoping with here, because as the Russians use Ukraine as a laboratory for their malware, they're actually testing the whole world. Sure. And, you know, apparently it's got several different levels where there's already, they get malware installed that will allow the importation of more malware, and quietly slip that in and let it just sit quietly infecting more and more machines, but not doing any harm until... So they want. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's really creepy, because what it means is we are already in the run up through World War III. In fact, some people think we are in World War III in terms of the cyber war, and this kind of stuff is all over the place right now, and those sleeping viruses are all over the place. I mean, the only, I guess, upside is that the U.S. apparently is doing much the same thing, although I guess we haven't tested ours as openly, but... Yeah. Well, see the mutual destruction, the mutual de-tugged. I mean, the problem is, and I don't think people realize this, is if you could knock off a power plant, and the Russians have done that, they've closed down government agencies, closed down all kinds of facilities in the Ukraine, if you could knock off a power plant, all of a sudden, no power, and no hospitals, no traffic lights, no telephones, no nothing, and you're reduced to the rubble of civilization, and people begin to devolve, and they begin to act out, and then society, as we knew it, stopped. And this is a big problem. You don't have to go further. You don't have to have guns. Right. What you have to do is terminate the power. Right. You know, if you can sort of destroy the whole energy sources that keep us all organized, you know, and apparently these systems can be used to just sort of knock stuff out, turn it off, so you can go back in and turn it on, or in some cases, again, they can run generators past their safety points, they can override, kill switches, and burn things out, and literally destroy equipment. One of the interesting things, I mean, of course, Russia under Putin wants to do this kind of thing. They want global hegemony, and they want to be able to attack people and show you just how powerful, right, he's into that. And he comes from the KGB, so he's into all this kind of dirty tricks, espionage. That's not a surprise. Remember what happened with that radioactive material that his enemies keep on eating, and it kills them. It's still happening, you know? But it's not only that, it's every single weapon that you can put your hands on, and then you have this kind of deceptive facade where you say, oh, it wasn't me, but it was, and what he's doing in Ukraine should not be a secret, and everyone should know about that. But here's the thing, how did he do it? How did he get that kind of sophistication? You know, there have been hackers from Russia for many years, from all parts of Russia, and for that matter, Eastern Europe, and for that matter, Eastern Russia, you know, Vladivostok is a haven for hackers, I mean, global hackers who think of nasty malware all day long. It's been a hobby for them, but somehow he assembled a workforce to do hacking on a large scale. Can you talk about that? Well, again, it's not well understood, I think, as to how this happened, but basically the powers that be in Russia realize this was sort of the next frontier of warfare, and that's where the battles were going to be fought. I mean, yes, nothing I may have missiles, but if you can take control of these missiles, I don't do him any good, right? Sure, you can spend billions on missiles, but they can be rendered useless. Yeah, if instead of going to the target in 10, oops, they turn around and come back and have the person fired. Oh, so it was worse, yeah. Yeah, yeah, or it'd blow up where they're sitting. I remember reading when this first started to come out about the hacking of the election that he had assembled a force from three sources. One was the army, his own army, which like the Chinese army has a certain amount of talent in this department. And as we do, and if you assign them a task of developing hacking software, cyber war software, then they will. But you need the young, you need the kids, you need the hackers in Vladivostok, you need the hackers in Western Russia, Eastern Europe, you need them. So you assemble them and you make deals with them. You have to negotiate arrangements with them, and then you bring them into the fold and they help the army in hacking. There's a third kind, and I remember reading this somewhere, there's a third kind, that's the criminal element who either hacks criminally or who are criminals in jail and Putin or the Russian government makes deals with them too and brings them into this very large force of hackers, which are in separate cells, not necessarily all in the same building or room. And they have their instructions on, you know, not only creating software, but on deploying the software. And in the case of the election, it was deploying, you know, misinformation, disinformation, as the KGB has done since its inception. No, no, it's, I mean, there's always, I think, in your military forces and all that, there's always an element of people who wanna, like, sort of show the guys who think they have control of security that they really don't. And Richard Feynman was apparently a great one for doing that kind of thing and then slipping notes into the secret files where the security guys would suddenly open up a file drawer that was supposed to be secure and there'd be a note from Richard saying, ha ha, you know, but you didn't expect to see this here. It's funny, but it's not. Right, right. On that level it's funny, but yes, when instead of somebody really doing malicious hacking and horrible hacking, that's, yeah, that's no laughing matter at all. Yeah, so I think he put these guys together and he adopted a program, as China has adopted, of doing very sophisticated hacking, testing, more hacking, more testing, to see if he could achieve global supremacy in hacking and cyber and anti-security. Sure, it's much cheaper. I mean, you have to build sophisticated nuclear weapons and get fantastic delivery systems, I mean, yeah, you develop some lines of code and sort of send them out in the world to see what harm they'll do. Yeah, yeah. It's an intellectual process. And the aggressive hacker is not at risk of losing his life or being wounded or maimed or anything like that. Catching a deadly disease, right. It's a great way to go. Exactly, and cheap, basically. I mean, you pay those people a good salary and you don't have to buy fancy stuff. Although I hear tell that the Stuxware software, there was a movie made, a wonderful documentary made about that, was, of course, billions, tens of billions to make a little software that would fit in a thumb drive, and that would infect all those computers. So I mean, let your imagination fly about what can be done. Right, and the different ways it can be done, you can get hacking that will come in, crash the system, then sit quietly, let the system come back up and then crash it again and do this repeatedly. Like a very clever virus. You sort of imitate a real virus and make it trick people in this way, in that way, and it goes to sleep and it wakes up, it travels from machine to machine, it does this, but then it does that. I mean, it's just a shot and froid about it. Let's make the other guy crazy. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Let's essentially destabilize the other guy's culture and society, and apparently, of course, the only reason it hasn't been particularly unleashed here is because they understand that we can do the same thing back to them, and you know. And you deflect being caught, right? And indeed, in this kind of warfare, nobody is ever caught. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even a hacker, a hacker can get away with doing this forever. There's a number of hackers that have actually been prosecuted, gone to jail, minimal. And so, a state hacker, he's not going to jail, he's gonna remain in the state he's at. And as long as that state has internet that's connected to other states, he doesn't have to stand up. He certainly doesn't have to cross the border into a dangerous place for him. He can just do it in a basement somewhere. Right, yeah. Sitting there in the comfort of his office chair. Yeah. So, I mean, we've identified two distinct kinds of cyber war, and one, of course, is what you would expect, the normal strategy of trying to bust your opponent, of ruining his command control in the military of the civilian world, taking his power plants down, communications, all the infrastructure, water, sewer, anything that's controlled by computers. And these days we know that everything is controlled by computer, the internet of things is about us. And everybody has every little thing as an IP address and every little thing is therefore vulnerable to a hacker. Right, I mean, does this set up an imbalance? If we are more dependent on our computers than the Russians are on their computers, then can they afford at some point to unleash a war or war? We're a great target. They'll be less hurt by it because they're not quite so dependent on. Yeah. And when you look and see what happened, that whole thing about, I'm gonna go, I am gonna identify all your power plants in the country and I am going to run them down at a certain point in time. I'm gonna overspend them or underspend them or something. And so they don't work, they don't deliver power. So now all the major cities, including cities in which there are federal establishments are down for a long time and nobody has a plan. And I really doubt that anybody does have a plan to bring them right back up. Doesn't work that way because you can't identify where the problem is. Okay, so now they're down, what happens? As I said before, the hospitals don't function, the roads don't function, communication is down, health is down, all of business in the economy is down. The whole thing has gotta evolve into a state of nature in a fairly short time. You have no options, you can't go to work, you have no money, you can't get your money out of the bank, you can't drive and people begin attacking each other in the state of nature. And before you know it, we're back to the Stone Age. I don't know how long that would take but I'm sure somebody has modeled that how long that would take. I'm sure that, yeah. Yeah, how many of these systems you have to damage how badly before it really does become a cascading kind of event where just avalanches, snowballs into complete. Chaos, chaos, chaos is no good for anybody. So I mean, I suppose there's some guys deep in the bowels of the Pentagon somewhere who have the same kind of plan on Russia but as you said a minute ago, Russia is not as vulnerable as we are because we are more dependent on the internet of things than Russia is, we're more advanced. And so we would actually suffer more severely. Right, although arguably because just of their geographic locations with so much of Russia being so far north, taking up the power over there in the middle of winter could have a much more devastating effect much more quickly. In certain places, yeah. It could just sort of freeze much of the country. So I think we must be in a kind of war of deterrence. Right. Just sort of the nuclear, what the nuclear deterrence was all about. Yeah, that means you're a destruction, right? Because yeah, everybody knows, I mean, I'm sure they, at some level, there's an engagement on this. At some level of spies and state agents as a, or just observers, they know that if we do it to them, they do it to us and vice versa. And then the whole world is in deep, deep trouble. Lives will be lost. Many, many lives will be lost. The human species will be substantially reduced if there's a war like that. So this brings me, this gives me a headache on both sides. So this brings me to a break. When I get a headache, I have a break. So let's have a break and come back. I'm gonna talk about why the Russians hacked our election. We already know they did. And how they hacked our election. Why and how they did that. We'll be right back after this break. We all play a role in keeping our community safe. Every day, we move in and out of each other's busy lives. It's easy to take for granted all the little moments that make up our every day. Some are good, others not so much. But that's life. It's when something doesn't seem quite right that it's time to pay attention. Because only you know what's not supposed to be in your every day. So protect your every day. If you see something suspicious, say something to local authorities. Living in this crazy world. So caught up in the confusion. Nothing is making sense. Okay, we're back. We're live with Ethan Allen on lackable science. And we're sort of tripping off an article that appeared in the MIT bulletin newsletter yesterday, was it? And it's pretty interesting and scary stuff. We've talked about how a state actor can bring down the grid, can bring down a lot of infrastructure systems in the adversary, and sort of tear the whole society down and one fell swoop. Or in little pieces if you want. Just sort of keep you off balance. But let's talk now about political hacking, political cyber war. Because that's in funny ways more pernicious. Just to put it in perspective, okay, it's nice to turn a power plant off that has a profound immediate effect. But it's different when you get into the psyche of the country. Into their essential social compact and you begin turning it and twisting it and stressing it together or at random with multiple attacks on the quality of thinking, the quality of thinking in a large hundreds of millions of population. And you find vulnerability there too. Right, so they actually have that set up in one of the Ukrainian elections where all the computers for essentially all the news agencies were set to announce the guy the Russians wanted to win the election as being the winner. The software was all plugged in and basically all ready to go and they actually only apparently detected this about an hour before the. What did it say? It basically sort of declared this one guy the winner who was not the winner. Oh! But all the news channels would have been co-op saying this. Oh! You know, yeah. Very, very unkind of thing. You know, once it's been widely announced, how can you announce it, you know? You can't take knowledge back at it that way. Oh, that is so interesting. It's so damaging. It's so clever and insidious. Because now people, you know, first impressions count, right? People are all confused about who won. And they're reacting already to it. Right, and then, yeah. Again, you break down any faith in government. You break down any faith in your system being stable. You make the truth a very amorphous thing. Yeah, well that goes for the couple of propositions that they're working on. So I think we have to turn the tables, turn the chess board and see it from their side. So they see us as a lend of tumultuous, the Tocqueville tumultuous place where everybody has arguments and controversy and disagreements, maybe more now than before. They see it as a fabric of a social compact that is always slightly fragile, or sometimes more. I think it's pretty fragile right now because of recent events. And they see people as maybe not so well educated. They see the schools in this country as not doing their job for educating in civics and government and the social compact in general law. I mean, recently there was a, there was an on the street question put to people to name the three branches of government in this country, citizens in this country in major metropolitan areas and a lot of them, many, many scary, many couldn't name the three branches of government. So we start out with that vulnerability. And then laying on top and we have media, television media and we have the commercials and we have the big news organizations that are actually confusing about themselves and have agendas that do not educate but they try to advocate. And they're always throwing opinions at you and sometimes their agendas are a mile wide. A good example would be Fox News. And so they know we are vulnerable but because we are not well educated that we are used to getting misinformation and living by it. So if you and I sat in a room, say in the bowels of Moscow and we try to figure out how we could confuse this country or a great number of, a great part of the demography of the country, we could figure it out, don't you think? I would never have guessed that they would do it in the way they did it. It was that same team, you know, from the army and from industry, I guess, or the young hackers and from the criminal sector who had dedicated and under a kind of a very strong contract to do hacking and to do cyber war. What better way to do cyber war than to knock off the essential system of your adversary? You know, to tear up the constitution, to tear up, as you said, public confidence. Yeah, right. If they can undermine public confidence in our form of government, in our government processes, it's exceeded without sort of any bloodshed at all in doing a major attack against them. I think your story about the Ukraine misinformation about who won the election is a good example but that is one of many, many techniques, I'm sure, that are used by Russia now and that could be used in the future to confuse this country. In fact, there are probably dozens of techniques that the misinformation guys in Russia use in order to confuse the American public into voting for Trump. They wanted Trump to win and they used a bunch of psychological and disinformation techniques to achieve that. If we sat for a while, Ethan, I'm sure we could figure out things to say to actually confuse vulnerable people to go the wrong way on voting. No, no, it certainly don't happen, right? Yeah, and it'll happen again. Oh, yes, that's... So my big question, we have three, four minutes left. My big question, I don't know if the MIT article covered this, but what do you do? What is this country do to preserve its democracy in the face of this kind of insidious attack? Yeah, I mean, one thing I think you gotta do is teach people the art of critical thinking, you know, the art of scientific skepticism and not just to sort of blindly go along with whatever you hear just because some yahoo says it. I'm your class, I'm your class, and you managed to get me in for an hour and we're having this civic discussion and you're trying to strengthen me so I can resist this kind of, you know, attack. What do you say to me? I mean, don't you have to have like four or six or eight years of education to really do that kind of critical thing? You're gonna give it to me in an hour? Well, yeah, I mean, you do need to have people who are have some practice in thinking and are willing to sort of reflect a bit on their own thinking in order to develop that skill, but that whole business of sort of metacognition is not as foreign as people seem to think. You know, kids can do it, kids will do it at times, but we don't practice it very much and you know, we have a culture that is not inclined to ask for the evidence and ask the hard questions, you know, why did you say that? What's the evidence here? What reason do you have that will convince me for this? People aren't, we aren't. And they're not giving up. I mean, and it's very hard to change them because you need decades to actually make that change. You have to roll it back and start again with huge populations and you have the political will to do that very hard. You have to say to them through their, the lifetime of their education, you have to say, do critical thinking. There will be people out there who try to misinform you and disinform you and deceive you and lie to you. You must know, you must think about when you are being lied to. So some years ago in the state of Virginia, I believe it was, was redoing their science standards for K-12 education. And this had passed to the state legislators, the bill. And apparently the legislators raised this issue. They said, but you're asking people students to question things. And like, we don't want this. And it's like, yes, but I mean, the whole business of science is to learn to ask good questions, right? That's when you, you know, it's not so much the answers at all. It's the questions of the world. It's a question. And, and clearly not enough people in this country are asking the right questions. No, no. And, and you know, the funny thing is when I go home at night or when I get up in the morning, I'm looking at the news. I'm looking at all the email that comes through. I'm looking at all that push technology which is pushing information on me. And I delete a lot of stuff right off the bat. I make that, that choice, right? I'm always triaging on what's coming at me. And a lot of people don't do that. They get sucked in and they don't realize that that particular, you know, email or social media push is coming from somewhere in Russia or by indirection. It's traveling all around the world and coming at me that way. And they think it's domestic. They don't think it's with foreign power. But again, our own media don't do a very good job of telling us important stuff and then they downplay important things. I just had the pleasure last week of having Chip Fletcher, a dean of SOEST in giving some talks to a workshop I was giving. And he points out the climate change issues are pressing upon us becoming day by day by day, more and more critical, harder and harder to stop. Impacts become larger and larger and people are just sort of ignoring it. Like closing their eyes, covering their ears, pretending it's not happening. And it's not doing us any good. It's certainly not gonna do our kids any good. Our grandkids are gonna do it. Sure, they're losing time, critical time. You know, the problem is that in order to combat this, you have to have a national leader who will get up and say, we have to have an initiative here to preserve our democracy, to preserve our information systems, to preserve our free press. And we have to do legislation. We have to have government organizations that go out and train people through critical thinking, whatever it is, we have to encourage the schools, the people, we have to get on the media and we have to say, look, we need to preserve our democracy. It's on all of you, every single one of you, every man, woman and child to preserve our democracy, to remember the social compact and Trump is not gonna do that. Quite the contrary. Because he's part of the problem. He's totally compromised. He's a free press, he's enemy. He basically belittles the press and tries to make out better liars and racketeers and all. That's right. So we lose four years in the battle. We lose four years of trying to get an advantage or hold our advantage and that's the critical thing. The best we can hope for is this next president will see this clearly, just as you and I have been talking about it. So if you're able to talk to the next president, actually Ethan, what would you say to him? Talk to camera one. View the problems clearly. Be sure you understand the problem. Be sure you have a clear grasp of what the real challenge is, what the most important and critical issues are. Yeah, it's not science, it's everything. It's science, it's technology and it's social science. Yeah, you've got to get everyone, we all have to be working together on these. These are big, complex problems. Yeah, and the MIT newsletter is probably a good place to start. Absolutely. Can you tell people what it is and how to find it? So it's the MIT download, they call it. You can get it, you can freely sign up for it. I think if you just go to MIT download, you can probably find it. I actually don't recall how I got it, but it comes into my mailbox every day now and always intriguing stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this isn't on the government. Ultimately it's on every single one of us. Absolutely. Thank you, Ethan. Great to talk to you as always. Next time soon. All right.