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U.S Needs Hackers—NOW!
Douglas Chick
The word hacker always stands out as a bad word for terrible people that perform
unscrupulous keyboard strokes for ill gotten gain. A hacker could be someone
that works for the Russian Mob, tricking stupid people out of their financial
information, or eager Chinese and Indian IT students practicing their newly
learned skills on fat unprotected American computers. (This shouldn’t even be a
challenge as most computers and software come from those two countries anyways.
They probably are logged in before we are.)
An employed hacker is an IT professional, or network engineer. An unemployed IT
professional can easily switch from a white to a black hat in an unstable
economy. In a poor economy many talented computer people with poor social skills
are often the first to be laid-off. Because there are limited opportunities out
there, they are forced to find alternate work that is ethically questionable.
If you are clever and talented computer engineer, but are forced to take a pizza
delivery job to make ends meat, you will find another way to use your
creativity. What else can a poor disgruntled computer engineer do?
--To be a hacker or not to be.
There is no question that overseas outsourcing provides cheaper labor for many
U.S. corporations, but we lost far more of our resources to overseas outsourcing
than mere jobs alone. There are an estimated
1,324,655,000
billion people in China, and another 1.139,964,932 billion people in India.
There are 310 million people in the U.S. If a fraction of the population of
either country deployed any type of cyber attack on the computer systems in the
U.S., (organized or acting independent of each other) there is not enough people
collectively in the U.S. to defend our countries computer borders. There may
even be more Chinese and Indian computer science students then are the entire
population of The United States? And with the internet wide open with a direct
connection to your home and work computer, (not to mention your cell phones)
Do we someday outsource our computer security to one country to protect us from
another?
Forefront of Innovation
The United States has always been at the forefront of the world’s technologies,
this is the single force that has made us the super power that we are today. In
recent years, though, it seems that our power of knowledge has been deliberately
gifted to other countries. This grant of technology superiority to other
countries for the sake giving Corporate America cheaper labor force has
seriously jeopardized the cyber/computer security of our nation. The computers
purchased in your neighborhood store are manufactured, assembled, and software
installed in other countries with little or no oversight for national security.
Still, despite all the inflammatory headlines that American’s are more
interested in reality television than science and technology, we still have
enough of the right people to turn back the ever advancing quiet invasion of
The United States. I’m not singling out the Chinese or Indian computer
people as a threat to the United States, in many ways I have more a common
interest with
them, in terms of computers, than I do with my neighbors. But by sheer volume alone, their combined
intelligences and ability is on a scale so large that I am frightened by it.
Better Safe than Sorry
If the folks in Washington could stop trying to turn the clocks back to 1950 and
start looking into the future towards 2050, they will see that we are completely
out numbered and surrounded by weapons from our own arsenal. There is a
potential cyber enemy that is growing faster in numbers than we can reproduce in
population. In other words; there may be more hackers being trained by foreign
governments right now, and then we give birth to and train in 50 years. The
Cyber Intelligence Agency, (If there were such an agency) needs to start
recruiting seasoned computer engineers right now; to train, educate, and turn
our countries young hackers into our cyber protectors. Otherwise we will be in
1950 again.
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