Jonathan Turley is right to say the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack was terrorism but it was also worse than that: the attack was a probe that further revealed the weakness of America's critical infrastructure.
We've heard calls in recent years for an ever-widening category of "terrorists" to encompass groups from the Jan. 6 rioters to antifa to the the Ku Klux Klan. So it is surprising that the White House and the media have referred to the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attackers simply as "hackers." "DarkSide" is not just a collection of hackers -- it's a group of terrorists. And the only thing more concerning than the failure to label them correctly is the possible reason for not doing so. ...The reason is obvious: Colonial just paid a ransom to terrorists. Moreover, gas pipelines are not just "a private company" but a highly regulated industry that closely follows the government's directions.
If it's not possible for the government to protect American infrastructure from cyber attacks then we need to significantly overhaul our national security system.
It may be true that the Biden administration concluded we are defenseless to cyber terrorism despite years of ransomware attacks and hundreds of billions of dollars in cybersecurity programs. If that is the case, the public should be informed. The failure of Congress and our government to defend against such terror attacks is a national security failure of breathtaking proportions. The Colonial Pipeline attack was the cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor. In both cases, we were caught unprepared and unable to deal with a threat we knew was coming. Yet President Roosevelt did not issue a "no comment" on the critical facts after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Back then, we believed FDR when he stated in his first inauguration that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."What the Biden administration seems to fear most is public recognition that it is afraid -- afraid of the vulnerability of our infrastructure, afraid that the public will learn what cyber terrorists already know.
Maybe America has been distracted by nonsense for a while and needs to refocus our attention on real problems.
