01.18.12
Spiked
From time to time I like to point out, first-hand, how stilted the mainstream press is. Everyone now believes the system is rigged for a certain outcome but not everyone gets to regularly experience it.
Over the holidays I was buttonholed by two reporters wishing to do stories on cyberwar.
One was from a medium-sized newspaper in New Jersey. The other was a Wall Street reporter from Die Zeit, the big German weekly newspaper.
Both wanted to go over the matter of turning off the US remotely via cyberattack. In the case of Die Zeit’s reporter, it was the oft repeated idea that a cyberattack could destroy the US financial system that needed scrutiny.
In both cases I told the journalists these claims were well over ten years old. And these are assertions the sellers of the cyberwar story have always used because they get lots of attention and can be reliably counted upon to be passed on unskeptically simply by dint of delivery by authority.
The claims do not adhere to any reasonable standard of proof in the scientific sense. That is, extraordinary statements can be made in the absence of any extraordinary evidence to support them.
When taken over the history of the matter the reporters, at least on the phone, found my telling of it compelling. The Die Zeit reporter was interested because she had been covering Wall Street for many years and couldn’t figure out how any such thing could be done.
Wall Street is fiendishly complex.
In fact, she indicated, the American, and by extension, the world financial system, is now so complicated she doubted anyone on the inside even fully understood it.
So I asked her to tell me what proof she had been given that the US financial market could be destroyed by cyberattack. And there really wasn’t anything convincing to it, we seemed to agree.
There was, however, some mumbo jumbo about stealth or malicious hedge funds and such.
To which I wryly remarked something to the effect that that, in effect, was part of the industry’s action in the economic collapse.
Americans don’t feel the cyberattack on the US financial system story. They have, instead, lived through a time when the financial system attacked them, repeatedly. And it continues to do so.
You can find evidence of this in the financial press, almost every day.
After the holiday season interviews, which were long, no stories resulted.
Contrast this with the number of repetitive drivel pieces asserting the coming of some manner of cyberwar every day.
Having worked at a newspaper and written for an alternative news weekly I can tell you why this works the way it does.
The short version (a long version would take a couple book chapters) is this: Editors just don’t like stories that don’t deliver some claim of imminent catastrophe, delivered by argument from on hight.
But there is certainly a story in the hard fact that what I’ve described has been peddled so invariantly for so long. If the names have changed, simply because people have aged out of the endeavor — it’s been over a decade, the nature of the sources and predictions have remained static.
There is rock solid proof in the historical record. But it is a tale too complicated, lacking in a titillating sense of looming danger, and self-impeaching for most to tell.