Daily Archives: 29 January 2020

No Room

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There’s no room for certain disfavored Democrats in Pete Buttigieg’s Progressive-Democrat Party; he made that clear in Sunday night’s townhall hosted by Fox News.

A pro-life Democrat named Kristen Day asked Buttigieg whether he wanted the support of “people like me….”

First Buttigieg showed his courage by weasel-wording an evasive answer that in Day’s view completely ignored half her question.

I am pro-choice, and I believe that a woman ought to be able to make that decision[.]

Day:

He didn’t answer the second part of my question, and the second part was: the Democratic platform contains language that basically says, “we don’t belong, we have no part in the party because it says abortion should be legal up to nine months, the government should pay for it.” In 1996 and several years after that there was language in the Democratic platform that said, “We understand that people have very differing views on this issue but we are a big tent party that includes everybody and therefore we welcome you—people like me—into the party so we can work on issues that we agree on.”

Buttigieg on being challenged over his evasiveness:

I support the position of my party—that this kind of medical care needs to be available to everyone, and I support the Roe v Wade framework that holds that early in pregnancy there are very few restrictions and late in pregnancy there are very few exceptions.

Buttigieg paraphrased: “Screw you, lady. I’m pro-abortion, and that’s the end of it. Medical care needs to be available to everyone but the babies involved; aborting babies is perfectly fine medical care.”

Foolish Risks

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Great Britain has decided to let the People’s Republic of China’s Huawei—which by PRC law must cooperate with the PRC government whenever that government requires it—to play a role in Britain’s development and deployment of its 5G telecommunications network.

Great Britain says Huawei role will be limited, but in a computer network, such limits lie somewhere between chimera and pipe dream.

The Brits say that Huawei, and “high risk vendors” generally, would be excluded from the network “core.”

The Brits say they are

taking steps that would allow it “to mitigate the potential risk posed by the supply chain and to combat the range of threats, whether cybercriminals, or state-sponsored attacks.”

And that

high-risk vendors would be subject to a 35% cap on access to even non-sensitive parts of the network.

Thirty-five per cent. That’s a broad penetration of a network’s “non-sensitive parts,” a network’s periphery.

This is foolish.

Mitigating risks is not the same as preventing them. This isn’t a matter of the Internet going down for a bit, and our not being able to post our blog articles or do a Bing search for this or that. It’s not a matter of losing a cable connection so we can’t watch TV for a few minutes or an hour, nor is it a matter of a temporary drop of cell phone access.  This is a matter of national security, and the difference between mitigation and prevention is critical.

It takes only a single opening in a network’s outlying accesses to enable a nefarious entity to insert malware into the network. Once inserted, that malware can proliferate on its own, even penetrate the core, and then that malware is positioned to allow the entity to engage in cybercrime, cyberespionage, cyber-triggered sabotage of other infrastructure.

Even were the core adequately protected, malware in the periphery still can render the core impotent by isolating it from the periphery—much as biological damage can isolate a body’s core, its brain, from the body.