America needs a wall.
Not the kind that Donald Trump is so hell-bent on building along our border with Mexico — a border wall will accomplish little, except for wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and raising market demand in Mexico for ropes, ladders and shovels.
No. The wall this country needs is a firewall.
As indicated by a recent study published in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence. The new research suggests that, “ideological cyberterrorist attacks are outpacing physical attacks among far-left groups.”
Which is to say, computer-terrorists (like Mr. Robot) are out-terroring conventional terrorists.
Cyberterror incidents from groups such as the Animal Liberation Front, the Earth Liberation Front and the international hacker conglomerate, Anonymous, are not only picking up in frequency, they’re also escalating in severity. Companies like Dow Chemical, industries ranging from meat production to fashion, and even the federal government itself have all been targeted by cyber-terrorists, sometimes to devastating ends.
The study, authored by Thomas Holt, a Michigan State University professor of criminal justice, examined both physical and cyber terrorist attacks committed by far-left groups between the years 2000 and 2015 throughout the US, Canada and the UK.
“The number of physical attacks by these groups was steady for the first few years of our study and then declined over time,” Holt said in a Eureka Alert press release. “At the time, cyberterrorist incidents began increasing and peaked at nine attacks in 2015. While we can't speculate as to why physical attacks have declined, we believe that the cyber component increased because these attacks generate an economic and emotional impact, draw attention to their cause from the public and may be less likely to lead to arrest.”
Essentially, the consequences of cyberterrorism are easier to evade than those associated with conventional bloodshed, while the effects are nearly as devastating. In fact, throughout his research, across all the incidents of cyberterrorism he looked at, Holt only found one case that ended in an arrest.
“These kinds of ideologically motivated attacks are devised to have an emotional and economic impact on groups that go against their beliefs,” Holt said. If you end up on the wrong side of one of these futuristic, leftie Jihadist groups, you stand to have your business attacked, your personal information leaked, your life hacked, your money stolen and your name dragged through the mud. And there isn’t really much you can do to stop it.
This is where our government, our military and our society should be focusing our defense funds. Fuck the border wall. America needs a national firewall to protect us from the blossoming threat of cyberterrorism. If there’s any solid platform for a candidate to run on in 2020, that’s it: Build the Firewall.
“The bottom line is that these attacks are happening and they're overlooked.” Says Holt. “If we don't get a handle understanding them now, we won't fully understand the scope of the threats today and how to prevent larger mobilization efforts in the future.”
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