Professor Shankar Sastry is the head of the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) a UC Berkeley-based effort to secure America’s — and, in part, the world’s — data networks from acts of sabotague and terrorism as well as criminal exploitation.
Asked just why an attack against a computer network in the U.S. constitutes a threat grave enough to be likened to an “electronic Pearl Harbor,” Prof. Sastry responds:
[O]ne could get in the power networks and turn off electric power in Chicago in the middle of the winter… The facts are that we are putting more and more, as an advanced society, we are putting in more and more computers into all kinds of physical infrastructures… and we haven’t fully understood the interdependencies among these different infrastructures.
In the following interview, we ask Prof. Sastry to elaborate on this scenario as well as what can be done to safeguard what are inherently open channels of communication and commerce.
- Shankar Sastry’s Home Page, Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley
- Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology
- Cyberterrorism & Computer Technology, Counter-Terrorism Training and Resources for Law Enforcement Publications, U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs
- Bruce Schneier, electronic security expert
- The Myth of Cyberterrorism, The Washington Monthly
- “US plans to ‘fight the net’ revealed,”| BBC News
- “The Other War on Terror,” Wired
- “Cyber War: Interview with John Arquilla,” Frontline