Gongol.com Archives: March 2025
March 24, 2025
Citing a report from Daily NK, TechCrunch says that North Korea is establishing a new hacker group within its intelligence service. The reports indicate that the group is going to focus on offensive hacking (like digital theft) while operating around-the-clock. ■ It's hard for those who had their formative years between the end of World War II and the dissolution of the Soviet Union to contextualize what the world's threats look like today. The two-superpower world of the classic Cold War didn't really make much room to consider countries as big as India, much less a nation like North Korea -- which, at 26 million people, is only slightly more populous than Florida, but with an economy so small that it's 20% smaller than Wyoming's. ■ But asymmetric techniques of warfare and conflict change that. If North Korea has just enough talented individuals, a modest Internet connection, and a few laptops, then it has enough capacity to potentially do consequential damage even to a country as large as the United States -- provided that it has no scruples about how the damage is done and nothing really to lose from being punished on the global stage. It's already a nation fundamentally cut off from the Internet; there's little left for it to lose. ■ Getting used to those systemic imbalances takes a level of adaptive thinking that not everyone in high office is prepared to demonstrate. The threat is very real and the damage that could be done is quite substantial. If our adversaries are unbounded by expectations of rules and norms, then our defenses must be robust and consistent. Inconsistent policy behavior will only impose costs in one direction: On ourselves.
Remembrance is valuable to the present
A memorial tribute to a 1910 train wreck received some notice in Iowa, as the event marked the 115th anniversary of the state's worst rail disaster. The Green Mountain crash killed 52 people when a passenger train traveling backwards derailed and wooden passenger cars were crushed by heavier steel ones. ■ Contemporary accounts of the crash were gruesome, and the death toll was awful. Yet it's still instructive, even if inter-urban passenger rail traffic is nonexistent in the state today. ■ For one thing, the coroner decided not to investigate because "it was evident that the wreck was caused by an accident". The railroad itself promised an inquiry in the immediate aftermath, but no thorough investigation of root causes was performed. Such a reaction would be unthinkable today; the NTSB looks at railroad accidents today, even if only a single fatality is involved. ■ For another, it's well worth appreciating that for however breathless the initial newspaper headlines, accidental death was a huge factor in daily life a century ago -- it remains much too significant a factor today, but it was astonishing back then. Hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of railroad workers died every year, and most years saw 25,000 to 40,000 of them injured. And those are just the workers, not even counting passengers. Today, the total number of occupational fatalities ranges between 4,500 and 5,500 among all occupations -- still too high, but strikingly fewer than the 10,000 or more annual fatal accidents that occurred a century ago, when the country was home to about a third as many people. The numerator has decreased, while the denomenator has grown: That's a tremendous success story. ■ Good outcomes like increasing workplace and transportation safety should never be taken for granted. They are the complex results of many individual events, experiences, and choices. Rules and regulations governing safety behavior should always remain subject to thoughtful revision and reform, as circumstances themselves change. But the much safer world we inhabit today should be appreciated as a cumulative outcome -- one not particularly amenable to radical reform, and one in which caution should always prevail over eagerness to make changes.
