Do you still believe in global governance? Hackers conducted one of the largest cyberattacks to date against the global supply chain. “Hackers just perpetrated one of the largest known supply chain cyberattacks so far. The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal report that IT management software giant Kaseya has fallen victim to a ransomware attack … three managed service providers it worked with had also succumbed to the attack and compromising over 200 companies.” The Russians, whom Joe Biden read the riot act to at the recent G7 meeting, are the suspected culprits.
It’s not certain who’s behind the attack, although Huntress tied the campaign to the Russia-linked REvil group that attacked beef supplier JBS.
The incident is the latest in a string of high-profile ransomware attacks, including JBS and Colonial Pipeline. It also follows the large-scale SolarWinds breaches attributed to another group, Nobelium. Online security is quickly becoming a major issue in the supply chain, and it’s not clear these problems will disappear any time soon.
The attack occurred on the Fourth of July just to rub it in. “Joe Biden said on Saturday he had directed US intelligence agencies to investigate a sophisticated ransomware attack that hit hundreds of American businesses as the Fourth of July holiday weekend began and aroused suspicions of Russian gang involvement.”
The global world’s long logistical tail is being raided and there aren’t enough sentry programmers available to guard a line strung out from hell to breakfast. When the risks of a long global supply chain begin to outweigh the costs of a shorter but more assured supply, the virtues of borders and nationality will reassert themselves — with political consequences. Until then, globalism remains the creed of the Western elite.
Still it’s hard to build a Green, rule-based world when Russia and China won’t listen to Joe Biden. While the West was closing coal, nuclear Asia started 600 coal plants. The Guardian writes:
Five Asian countries are jeopardising global climate ambitions by investing in 80% of the world’s planned new coal plants, according to a report.
Carbon Tracker, a financial thinktank, has found that China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam plan to build more than 600 coal power units, even though renewable energy is cheaper than most new coal plants.
The investments in one of the most environmentally damaging sources of energy could generate a total of 300 gigawatts of energy – enough to power the UK more than three times over – despite calls from climate experts at the UN for all new coal plants to be cancelled.
Every ounce of “carbon” Western environmentalists painstakingly squeeze out of consumers in years is replaced by China in mere weeks. Unlike “our” left, which prioritizes ideology, “their” left focuses on maximizing political and economic power. Xi and Putin are defeating the global world by ignoring it.
Meanwhile, the white Western left, what the Chinese disparagingly call the baizuo, just keep doubling down. Progressives invested heavily in lockdowns and contact tracing, in the process turning 4.7 billion cellular phones into potential targets for hackers. The Western planners, in their desire to control their populations, simply made it easier for the cyber-wolfpacks and the supply chain disruptors to raid and raid and raid.
Hackers are the 21st century equivalent of privateers engaging in warfare under a commission of war. As the MIT Technology Review explains:
Just weeks after a major American oil pipeline was struck by hackers, a cyberattack hit the world’s largest meat supplier. What next? Will these criminals target hospitals and schools? Will they start going after US cities, governments—and even the military?
In fact, all of these have been hit by ransomware already. While the onslaught we’ve seen in the last month feels new, hackers holding services hostage and demanding payments has been a huge business for years. Dozens of American cities have been disrupted by ransomware, while hospitals were hit by attacks even during the depths of the pandemic. And in 2019, the US military was targeted. But that doesn’t mean what we’re seeing now is just a matter of awareness. So what’s different now? …
That leads to the next dimension of the problem: The hackers work from countries where they can avoid prosecution. They operate massive criminal empires and remain effectively immune to all attempts to rein them in. This is what Biden will bring up to Putin in the coming weeks.
What progressives forgot to tell the public about the global world is that in exchange for the megaprofits reaped by corporate offshoring, the entire planet would be exposed to global threats from disease, hackers, and supply chain disruptors. In a sense, the 2020 election was a runoff between globalism and populism. But with new experiences coming to hand, these issues will be revisited again all over the world.
Books: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: We get to make the first move.
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