Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

Be Ready When the Internet Goes Down

The recent spike in cyber attacks should serve as a huge wake-up call. We have cast our futures with the most fragile of technologies. The data we depend on—financial, personal, family, corporate—can all be compromised or completely lost in a strike by a clever bully.

It used to take a team, or, more likely, an entire nation, to bring down a Goliath but now there are lethal pebbles strewn at David’s sandaled feet.

It seems impossible to disentangle ourselves, personally, from the networks of cyber connections that are tugging us one way or another. I discovered one safeguard quite by accident when I was at the bank and the teller suggested putting an alert on my account when it got to a certain level. OK. I trust my bank, so I asked them to send me an e-mail when the balance got to $250. They did it and within days I got an e-mail. I knew I had more wiggle room but, guess what, my account had been hacked and a month’s worth of bill payments had vanished into a company that seems to have been created just to steal. It’s under investigation.

The perps in this case seem to have been Russian. Ditto the JBS ransom attack that If so, that stopped the flow of 25% of the meat in the US, Canada, and lots of other places. If Russians are indeed the masterminds, they’ve found a way to take the US on without superior fire power or spy gear. Let’s say we send tanks in to the nerve centrals of their world wide webs. As soon as our weapons appear on their radar, we’re zapped with a new cyber attack and our communications disabled.

On a personal level, we’re as fragile without our networks as folks living hundreds of years ago. In my case, the lightning bolt of understanding came when my health took a sudden dive and I couldn’t imagine ever being well again. My head hurt, my body ached, I had a fever, I couldn’t make a sentence. It was the Thursday before Memorial Day, and the decline was so sudden that I didn’t have time to cancel things. I dragged myself to a zoom call on Thursday, and to an in-person meeting on Friday that put me back in bed until too late on Saturday to get in on a doctor appointment. Since all I’ve heard for 15 months is COVID, I was pretty sure I needed a test, even though I’ve had the vaccines, yay! So, in a rare moment when I could negotiate the phone, I started calling and e-mailing the nearby hospitals and pharmacies that said they had the tests.

As soon as I began, I found myself in the land of robot voices, requests for passwords, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. It was exhausting to get through just one call with one robot and, in fact, I never really finished any of the calls to the point of making an appointment. They needed numbers I didn’t have in front of me, like the date I got my vaccine. Sorry, that certificate’s a long way from this bed where I’m calling from. I longed to talk to a human voice, but there was none.

Living between a big town and a small town, I usually feel like I can take advantage of either one, but in this case the little pharmacies didn’t have COVID tests. All the testing was contracted with the big chain stores. I learned that phone numbers for the chain-store pharmacy in both towns took me to the same robot. The second call would want me to start over, and if I tried to take over with the system on-line, I’d find that the process had timed out and I’d be locked out.

I’m pretty sure you know what I mean, because this scenario is familiar to all of us. It happens sometimes when we try to order something on-line or when we have a snafu with a credit card or bank. The bank that answers the phone with a cheerful hello rather than a “press one, press two” has gotten my business forever.

So, OK, on Monday, I finally got ahold of my doctor in her little office with her two employees and we talked it all through. She checked the boxes and decided it wasn’t COVID. Yep, I’d had a tick bite. Relieved? Not really, but at least we had a diagnosis she could treat. She called in a prescription and I’ve recovered enough to write this column.

One thing we know about monopolies is that they make it impossible to think of ways to survive without them. Find the bank, the doctor, the pharmacy, the farmer that can help out when the internet is down. Support them, keep them in business, and, fingers crossed, they’ll take care of you.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. She also is a co-founder of CAFOZone.com, a website for people who are affected by concentrated animal feeding operations. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History”. Email: margotmcmillen @gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2021

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