A blog by
blogfodder started me thinking about the real problem with Russia being able to
hack our latest Presidential election.
We spend
more on our military than the next half-dozen most powerful militaries
combined, and now Trump wants to increase military spending dramatically.
It is not a
matter of how much we spend, but how we spend our defense money that should be
of concern. Congressional and Senate
persons finance their reelections by whoring for companies wishing to sell big
money items to the government. Thus we
often spend way too much money on military products that are obsolete before
they are even delivered, or products that have massive cost overruns and don’t
work as advertised.
The new F-35
fighter jet, at a billion dollars per aircraft, is an example of an imperfect
money hole.
How does
this tie in with election hacking?
Our computer infrastructure throughout the
government is sorely inadequate. The
computer industry doesn’t have the same lobbying clout as Lockheed Aircraft Company
– so we will dump an easy trillion into Lockheed while leaving ourselves with
third world computer technology throughout the government.
Our general government
and military computer systems are out of date, and the computer systems of the
VA are embarrassingly antiquated. The military
and the VA systems cannot even transfer and share data, which is one of the
major causes of the VA’s inability to promptly service new veterans. Even more concerning is our nuclear delivery
systems with computer technology so old that launch codes have to be entered
with floppy disk.
The
Obamacare roll-out is a prime example.
We have some of the most advanced computer hardware and software
manufacturers in the world located in the United States, and yet we bumble
along and get along with outdated and outmoded technology running our
government.
The only
thing that saved us from Russia being able to totally manipulate or even crash
our election last year is that our election computers – where they exist – are
not standardized; they are out of date and not mutually connected to a secure internet
system.
Much of the
next war will be fought by crashing critical vulnerable computer systems. Our computers are hackable, our cars are
hackable, the F-35 is hackable, our power grid is hackable… But we continue to contract for
billion-dollar aircraft while ignoring our real vulnerability.
We have for
too long been focused on our ability to attack and respond, and not on our
vulnerabilities; and we have for too long allowed congressional pork to dictate
our military spending.
There is only
one fix for this misappropriation of government money, and government
priorities that are for sale. It is
called TERM LIMITS.
the
Ol’Buzzard
Term limits will encourage your elected representatives to steal as much as they can in the time they have. Voting them out of office is how it needs to be done. The same clout needed to set term limits will also be enough to end gerrymandering and corporate/dark money and get rid of elections every two years.
ReplyDeleteThe every man/woman for themselves type of system you have seems designed for each elected representative to sell themselves to the highest bidder. On the other hand, it did keep the ObamaCare in place.