Zero Days Negative mi 7

critical infrastructure advantage

1nc critical infrastructure

Reject doom and gloom predictions --- redundancies check major collapse

Hodgson 15 [Quentin E., Chief of Staff for Cyber Policy, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Occasional Papers Series, conference, published by the Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy, 4-1-2015, “Cybersecurity and National Defense: Building a Public-Private Partnership,” http://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=rusk_oc] //khirn

A lot of the time — and I’ll just close with this — a lot of the time, when we talk about cyberspace, there’s lots of doom and gloom. I just want to get back to the piece about critical infrastructure. You know, you’ll hear people talk about the zero-day exploits, gray and black markets and how people are constantly scanning critical infrastructure. I think it’s a very important thing that we need to track, but I think it’s also very important to understand, from at least the Department of Defense perspective: systemic failure of these kinds of systems is not an easy thing to do. And so we have to really be very cautious about how we think about these kinds of threats. There are certainly threats to a power substation, for instance, that can come through cyberspace, but does that mean the entire system will go down? Probably not. In fact, given where I live–my local company is PEPCO, one of the most hated companies in America — and one thing they’ve gotten very good at is not having a functioning system that they are able to get back up and running again, and we manage to live through that. On the other hand, if somebody was to target, for instance, the power generation side of things, not the distribution side of things, GE, for instance, does not have large-scale gas turbines just sitting on a shelf. It doesn’t make sense for them to do that. That’s the case where, if somebody could use a cyber attack to disable a large swath of those kinds of machines, to kind of go “stucksnet” on them, to coin a phrase, that could have a significant impact to the United States. But we have to understand that that’s something that for the most part, is only within the reach of very few nation-states, and we think that’s still the case. There may be some very talented individuals out there, but understanding the complexity of these systems and that there are redundancies in these systems, we should note a word of caution: we have to be prepared to address these threats, but we shouldn’t be slaves to the doom and gloom all the time and should understand what’s real and what’s not real when it comes to these risks. So, with that, I’ll conclude my remarks and thank you.

Low probability of attack – difficulty and cost

Rid and Buchanan 14 -- professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and PhD candidate (Thomas and Ben, 12/23/2014, Attributing Cyber Attacks, pg. 21, Taylor and Francis online, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2014.977382) /AMarb

Computer network exploitation requires preparation. Analysing the abilities required to breach a specific network can be a useful clue in the attribution process. The Stuxnet attack on Iran’s heavily-guarded nuclear enrichment facility was highly labour-intensive. The malware’s payload required superb target-specific information, for instance hardto-get details about specific frequency-converter drives used to control rotational speeds of motors; about the detailed technical parameters of the Iranian IR-1 centrifuges in Natanz; or about the resonance-inducing critical input frequency for the specific configuration of these machines.48 Stuxnet also used an unprecedented number of zero days, four or five, and exhibited the first-ever rootkit for a programmable logic controller (used to control industrial machinery).49 These characteristics drastically limited the number of possible perpetrators. Other preparations include target reconnaissance and payload testing capabilities. Again Stuxnet is a useful example: the attack reprogrammed a complex target system to achieve a kinetic effect. This required advance testing.50 The testing environment would have to use IR-1 centrifuges. Such machinery can be expensive and hard to obtain. No non-state actor, and indeed few governments, would likely have the capability to test Stuxnet, let alone build and deploy it. This further narrows the possibilities.

Zero chance of effective cyber attack

Lin 14 [Patrick, “Just the Right Amount of Cyber Fear,” The Atlantic, January 6, 2014, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/just-the-right-amount-of-cyber-fear/282787] //khirn

Likewise, “cyberterrorism” is a much-ballyhooed but vague fear: a “term like cyberterrorism has as much clarity as cybersecurity, that is none at all.” The fear also doesn’t seem to match the hype: ... the “Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters” claimed responsibility for a series of denial-of-service attacks on five U.S. banking firms. While many believe they stole credit for cybercriminals’ work, the effects of the attacks were negligible, shutting down customer access to the sites for a few hours. Most customers didn’t even know there had been an attack. Take out the word “cyber” and we wouldn’t even call such a nuisance “terrorism” … As one cyber expert put it to us, “There are threats out there, but there are no threats that threaten our fundamental way of life.” Perhaps to Iran, the Stuxnet worm is a clear example of a cyberterrorist attack, if not an outright act of cyberwar. The malware blew up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and their replacement for over a year—key equipment in their alleged illegal development of nuclear weapons. Singer and Friedman not only walk us through this dramatic operation—a real-life Mission: Impossible plot—but they also use Stuxnet as a case study in ethical cyberweapons. In contrast to indiscriminate malware, such as an email virus, Stuxnet was designed to activate under highly specific conditions that narrowed its target to one, e.g., only if exactly 984 centrifuges were linked together and controlled by a certain operating system. This specificity and requisite inside knowledge reveals how hard it is to hit a weapons lab or any other sensitive facility, and therefore how unlikely cyberterrorism might be: To cause true damage entails an understanding of the devices themselves: how they run, their engineering, and their underlying physics. Stuxnet, for example, involved cyber experts as well as experts in nuclear physics and engineers familiar with a specific kind of Siemens-brand industrial equipment. On top of the required expertise, expensive software tests had to be conducted on working versions of the target hardware. As a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy [George Lucas] explains, “the threat of cyber terrorism, in particular, has been vastly overblown,” because conducting a truly mass-scale act of terrorism using cyber means “simply outstrips the intellectual, organizational, and personnel capacities of even the most well-funded and well-organized terrorist organization, as well as those of even the most sophisticated international criminal enterprises. To be blunt: neither the 14-year old hacker in your next-door neighbor’s upstairs bedroom, nor the two or three person al Qaeda cell holed up in some apartment in Hamburg are going to bring down the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams.” By comparison, the entire 9/11 plot cost less than $250,000 in travel and organizational costs and used simple box-cutters.

1nc grid impact

Power grid is attacked twice a week anyway, no impact

Toppa 3/25 (SABRINA TOPPA: a journalist in Asia, formerly working at TIME Magazine’s Asia headquarters in Hong Kong. Before this, she also worked at Kathmandu Post in Nepal and the Dhaka Tribune in Bangladesh after serving as Rice University’s Zeff Fellow from 2013-2014. Time Magazine: “The National Power Grid Is Under Almost Continuous Attack, Report Says.” Published March 25^th, 2015. Accessed June 26, 2015. http://time.com/3757513/electricity-power-grid-attack-energy-security/) KalM

The U.S. national power grid faces physical or online attacks approximately “once every four days,” according to a new investigation by USA Today, threatening to plunge parts of the country into darkness. For its report, USA Today scrutinized public records, national energy data and records from 50 electric utilities. It found that from 2011 to 2014, the U.S. Department of Energy received 362 reports from electric utilities of physical or cyber attacks that interrupted power services. In 2013, a Department of Homeland Security branch recorded 161 cyber attacks on the energy sector, compared to just 31 in 2011. Worryingly, most of the nation’s power infrastructure has poor defenses — sometimes only a security camera and fence. In April 2013, PG&E Corp’s Metcalf Transmission Substation in California reported that over 100 ammunition rounds were fired into its transformers, causing over $15 million worth of damage. The gunmen were never apprehended — neither have the perpetrators of over 300 physical attacks on electricity infrastructure since 2011.

Utilities are un-hackable

Tanji 10 [Michael, spent 20 years in the US intelligence community; veteran of the US Army; served in strategic and tactical assignments worldwide; participated in national and international analysis and policy efforts for the NIC, NSC and NATO; Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow and Senior Fellow at the Center of Threat Awareness; lectures on intelligence issues at The George Washington University, 7/13/10, “Hacking the Electric Grid? You and What Army?,” http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/hacking-the-electric-grid-you-and-what-army] //khirn

People have claimed in the past to be able to turn off the internet, there are reports of foreign penetrations into government systems, “proof” of foreign interest in attacking U.S. critical infrastructure based on studies, and concerns about adversary capabilities based on allegations of successful critical infrastructure attacks. Which begs the question: If it’s so easy to turn off the lights using your laptop, how come it doesn’t happen more often? The fact of the matter is that it isn’t easy to do any of these things. Your average power grid or drinking-water system isn’t analogous to a PC or even to a corporate network. The complexity of such systems, and the use of proprietary operating systems and applications that are not readily available for study by your average hacker, make the development of exploits for any uncovered vulnerabilities much more difficult than using Metasploit. To start, these systems are rarely connected directly to the public internet. And that makes gaining access to grid-controlling networks a challenge for all but the most dedicated, motivated and skilled — nation-states, in other words.

2nc grid impact

Grids are very resilient

Avila 12 (Jim, Senior National Correspondent at ABC News, “A U.S. Blackout as Large as India’s? ‘Very Unlikely’”, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/07/a-u-s-blackout-as-large-as-indias-very-unlikely/)

As India recovers from a blackout that left the world’s second-largest country — and more than 600 million residents — in the dark, a ripple of uncertainty moved through the Federal Regulatory Commission’s command center today in the U.S. The Indian crisis had some people asking about the vulnerability of America’s grid. “What people really want to know today is, can something like India happen here? So if there is an outage or some problem in the Northeast, can it actually spread all the way to California,” John Wellinghoff, the commission’s chairman, told ABC News. “It’s very, very unlikely that ultimately would happen.” Wellinghoff said that first, the grid was divided in the middle of the nation. Engineers said that it also was monitored more closely than ever. The grid is checked for line surges 30 times a second. Since the Northeast blackout in 2003 — the largest in the U.S., which affected 55 million — 16,000 miles of new transmission lines have been added to the grid. And even though some lines in the Northeast are more than 70 years old, Wellinghoff said that the chances of a blackout like India’s were very low.

Status quo solves grid cyber vulnerability

Clark, 12

4/28/12, “The Risk of Disruption or Destruction of Critical U.S. Infrastructure by an Offensive Cyber Attack,” Paul Clark is an MA candidate in intelligence/terrorism studies at the American Military University, http://blog.havagan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/The-Risk-of-Disruption-or-Destruction-of-Critical-U.S.-Infrastructure-by-an-Offensive-Cyber-Attack.pdf

An attack against the electrical grid is a reasonable threat scenario since power systems are "a high priority target for military and insurgents" and there has been a trend towards utilizing commercial software and integrating utilities into the public Internet that has "increased vulnerability across the board" (Lewis 2010). Yet the increased vulnerabilities are mitigated by an increased detection and deterrent capability that has been "honed over many years of practical application" now that power systems are using standard, rather than proprietary and specialized, applications and components (Leita and Dacier 2012). The security of the electrical grid is also enhanced by increased awareness after a smart-grid hacking demonstration in 2009 and the identification of the Stuxnet malware in 2010: as a result the public and private sector are working together in an "unprecedented effort" to establish robust security guidelines and cyber security measures (Gohn and Wheelock 2010).

Grids are actively improving

Koerth-Baker, 12

(8/3/12 Maggie Koerth-Baker is a science editor – Boing Boing, columnist – NYT Magazine, electric grid expert, , “Blackout: What's wrong with the American grid,” http://boingboing.net/2012/08/03/blackout-whats-wrong-with-t.html)

But this is about more than mere bad luck. The real causes of the 2003 blackout were fixable problems, and the good news is that, since then, we’ve made great strides in fixing them. The bad news, say some grid experts, is that we’re still not doing a great job of preparing our electric infrastructure for the future. Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front: The North American electric grid is not one bad day away from the kind of catastrophic failures we saw in India this week. I’ve heard a lot of people speculating on this, but the folks who know the grid say that, while such a huge blackout is theoretically possible, it is also extremely unlikely. As Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute put it, “An engineer will never say never,” but you should definitely not assume anything resembling an imminent threat at that scale. Remember, the blackouts this week cut power to half of all Indian electricity customers. Even the 2003 blackout—the largest blackout in North America ever—only affected about 15% of Americans. We don’t know yet what, exactly, caused the Indian blackouts, but there are several key differences between their grid and our grid. India’s electricity is only weakly tied to the people who use it, Gellings told me. Most of the power plants are in the far north. Most of the population is in the far south. The power lines linking the two are neither robust nor numerous. That’s not a problem we have in North America. Likewise, India has considerably more demand for electricity than it has supply. Even on a good day, there’s not enough electricity for all the people who want it, said Jeff Dagle, an engineer with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Advanced Power and Energy Systems research group. “They’re pushing their system much harder, to its limits,” he said. “If they have a problem, there’s less cushion to absorb it. Our system has rules that prevent us from dipping into our electric reserves on a day-to-day basis. So we have reserve power for emergencies.

Military computers are resilient

Weimann 4

Gabriel Weimann, senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and professor of communication at the University of Haifa, Israel, 2004, Cyberterrorism How Real Is the Threat?, ttp://www.usip.org/files/resources/sr119.pdf

Neither al Qaeda nor any other terrorist organization appears to have tried to stage a serious cyberattack. For now, insiders or individual hackers are responsible for most attacks and intrusions and the hackers’ motives are not political. According to a report issued in 2002 by IBM Global Security Analysis Lab, 90 percent of hackers are amateurs with limited technical proficiency, 9 percent are more skilled at gaining unauthorized access but do not damage the files they read, and only 1 percent are highly skilled and intent on copying files or damaging programs and systems. Most hackers, it should be noted, try to expose security flaws in computer software, mainly in the operating systems produced by Microsoft. Their efforts in this direction have sometimes embarrassed corpo- rations but have also been responsible for alerting the public and security professionals to serious security flaws. Moreover, although there are hackers with the ability to damage systems, disrupt e-commerce, and force websites offline, the vast majority of hackers do not have the necessary skills and knowledge. The ones who do, generally do not seek to wreak havoc. Douglas Thomas, a professor at the University of Southern California, spent seven years studying computer hackers in an effort to understand better who they are and what motivates them. Thomas interviewed hundreds of hackers and explored their “literature.” In testimony on July 24, 2002, before the House Subcommittee on Govern- ment Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations, Thomas argued that “with the vast majority of hackers, I would say 99 percent of them, the risk [of cyberterrorism] is negligible for the simple reason that those hackers do not have the skill or ability to organize or execute an attack that would be anything more than a minor inconvenience.” His judgment was echoed in Assessing the Risks of Cyberterrorism, Cyber War, and Other Cyber Threats, a 2002 report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, written by Jim Lewis, a sixteen-year veteran of the State and Commerce Depart- ments. “The idea that hackers are going to bring the nation to its knees is too far-fetched a scenario to be taken seriously,” Lewis argued. “Nations are more robust than the early analysts of cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare give them credit for. Infrastructure systems [are] more flexible and responsive in restoring service than the early analysts realized, in part because they have to deal with failure on a routine basis.” Many computer security experts do not believe that it is possible to use the Internet to inflict death on a large scale. Some pointed out that the resilience of computer systems to attack is the result of significant investments of time, money, and expertise. As Green describes, nuclear weapons systems are protected by “air-gapping”: they are not connected to the Internet or to any open computer network and thus they cannot be accessed by intruders, terrorists, or hackers. Thus, for example, the Defense Department protects sensitive systems by isolating them from the Internet and even from the Pentagon’s own internal network. The CIA’s classified computers are also air-gapped, as is the FBI’s entire computer system.

Cyber-attacks don’t threaten electrical grid

Lewis 02 (James Andrew Lewis is the Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Assessing the Risks of Cyber Terrorism, Cyber War and Other Cyber Threats:” http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/021101_risks_of_cyberterror.pdf) KalM

The U.S. has already run a large-scale experiment on the effects of disrupting electrical power supplies, thanks to California’s experience with ‘deregulation’ last year. California’s efforts to de-regulate the electrical power market resulted in months of blackouts and rolling brownouts across the state. Deregulation was a more powerful ‘attack’ on the electrical infrastructure than anything a cyber-terrorist could mount. There was clearly economic cost to the California regulatory event, but it was not crippling nor did it strike terror into the hearts of Americans. Similarly, power outages across the country in 1999 affected millions of people and cost electrical power customers millions of dollars in lost business and productivity. These outages were the result of increased electricity use prompted by sustained high summer temperatures. In contrast to California’s State government or hot weather, the number of blackouts in U.S. caused by hackers or cyber-terrorists remains zero.

1nc water impact

Cyber terror isn’t a threat to water supply: old tech, no effect, and high difficulty

Lewis 02 (James Andrew Lewis is the Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Assessing the Risks of Cyber Terrorism, Cyber War and Other Cyber Threats:” http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/021101_risks_of_cyberterror.pdf) KalM

In the United States, the water supply infrastructure would be an elusive target for cyber attack. There are 54,064 separate water systems in the U.S. Of these, 3,769 water systems serve eighty one percent of the population and 353 systems served forty-four percent of the population. However, the uneven spread of diverse network technologies complicates the terrorists’ task. Many of these water supply systems in the U.S., even in large cities, continue to rely on technologies not easily disrupted by network attacks. There have been cases in the U.S. when a community’s water supply has been knocked out for days at a time (usually as a result of flooding), but these have produced neither terror nor paralysis. A cyber terrorist or cyber warrior would need to carry out a sustained attack that would simultaneously disrupt several hundred of these systems to gain any strategic benefit. Assuming that a terrorist could find a vulnerability in a water supply system that would allow him to shut down one city’s water for a brief period, this vulnerability could be exploited to increase the damage of a physical attack (by denying fire fighters access to water). In general, a cyber attack that alone might pass unnoticed in the normal clutter of daily life could have useful multiplier effects if undertaken simultaneously with a physical attack. This sort of simultaneous combination of physical and cyber attacks might be the only way in which cyber weapons could be attractive to terrorists. The American Waterworks Association assessment of the terrorist threat to water supplies placed “physical destruction of the system's components to disrupt the supply of water” as the most likely source of infrastructure attack.4

No cyber terror risk

Lewis 02 (James Andrew Lewis is the Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Assessing the Risks of Cyber Terrorism, Cyber War and Other Cyber Threats:” http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/021101_risks_of_cyberterror.pdf) KalM

While the press has reported that government officials are concerned over Al Qaeda plans to use the Internet to wage cyber-terrorism, these stories often recycle the same hypothetical scenarios previously attributed to foreign governments’ cyber-warfare efforts. The risk remains hypothetical but the antagonist has changed from hostile states to groups like Al Qaeda. The only new element attributed to Al Qaeda is that the group might use cyber attacks to disrupt emergency services in order to reinforce and multiply the effect of a physical attack. If cyber-attacks were feasible, the greatest risk they might pose to national security is as corollaries to more traditional modes of attacks.

Resource wars don’t happen, their ev is hype

Victor 07 (David G. Victor is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. He is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he directed a task force on energy security. He is also a frequent writer on natural resource policy. The National Interest: “What Resource Wars?” published November/December, 2014. Accessed June 26, 2015. http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dgvictor/publications/Faculty_Victor_Article_2007_What%20Resource%20Wars_The%20National%20Interest.pdf) KalM

Rising energy prices and mounting concerns about environmental depletion have animated fears that the world may be headed for a spate of “resource wars”— hot conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab valuable resources. Such fears come in many stripes, but the threat industry has sounded the alarm bells especially loudly in three areas. First is the rise of China, which is poorly endowed with many of the resources it needs—such as oil, gas, timber and most minerals—and has already “gone out” to the world with the goal of securing what it wants. Violent conflicts may follow as the country shunts others aside. A second potential path down the road to resource wars starts with all the money now flowing into poorly governed but resource-rich countries. Money can fund civil wars and other hostilities, even leaking into the hands of terrorists. And third is global climate change, which could multiply stresses on natural resources and trigger water wars, catalyze the spread of disease or bring about mass migrations. Most of this is bunk, and nearly all of it has focused on the wrong lessons for policy. Classic resource wars are good material for Hollywood screenwriters. They rarely occur in the real world. To be sure, resource money can magnify and prolong some conflicts, but the root causes of those hostilities usually lie elsewhere. Fixing them requires focusing on the underlying institutions that govern how resources are used and largely determine whether stress explodes into violence. When conflicts do arise, the weak link isn’t a dearth in resources but a dearth in governance. Resource wars are largely back in vogue within the U.S. threat industry because of China’s spectacular rise. Brazil, India, Malaysia and many others that used to sit on the periphery of the world economy are also arcing upward. This growth is fueling a surge in world demand for raw materials. Inevitably, these countries have looked overseas for what they need, which has animated fears of a coming clash with China and other growing powers over access to natural resources. Within the next three years, China will be the world’s largest consumer of energy. Yet, it’s not just oil wells that are working harder to fuel China, so too are chainsaws. Chinese net imports of timber nearly doubled from 2000 to 2005. The country also uses about one-third of the world’s steel (around 360 million tons), or three times its 2000 consumption. Even in coal resources, in which China is famously well-endowed, China became a net importer in 2007. Across the board, the combination of low efficiency, rapid growth and an emphasis on heavy industry—typical in the early stages of industrial growth—have combined to make the country a voracious consumer and polluter of natural resources. America, England and nearly every other industrialized country went through a similar pattern, though with a human population that was much smaller than today’s resource-hungry developing world. Among the needed resources, oil has been most visible. Indeed, Chinese state-owned oil companies are dotting Africa, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf with projects aimed to export oil back home. The overseas arm of India’s state oil company has followed a similar strategy—unable to compete head-to-head with the major Western companies, it focuses instead on areas where humanrights abuses and bad governance keep the major oil companies at bay and where India’s foreign policy can open doors. To a lesser extent, Malaysia engages in the same behavior. The American threat industry rarely sounds the alarm over Indian and Malaysian efforts, though, in part because those firms have less capital to splash around and mainly because their stories just don’t compare with fear of the rising dragon. These efforts to lock up resources by going out fit well with the standard narrative for resource wars—a zero-sum struggle for vital supplies. But will a struggle over resources actually lead to war and conflict? To be sure, the struggle over resources has yielded a wide array of commercial conflicts as companies duel for contracts and ownership. State-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s (cnooc) failed bid to acquire U.S.-based Unocal—and with it Unocal’s valuable oil and gas supplies in Asia—is a recent example. But that is hardly unique to resources—similar conflicts with tinges of national security arise in the control over ports, aircraft engines, databases laden with private information and a growing array of advanced technologies for which civilian and military functions are hard to distinguish. These disputes win and lose some friendships and contracts, but they do not unleash violence.

at: agriculture

US ag. Doesn’t feed the world

Charles 13 (Dan Charles is NPR's food and agriculture correspondent. National Public Radio: ” American Farmers Say They Feed The World, But Do They?” published September 17, 2013. Accessed June 28^th, 2015. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/09/17/221376803/american-farmers-say-they-feed-the-world-but-do-they) KalM

When critics of industrial agriculture complain that today's food production is too big and too dependent on pesticides, that it damages the environment and delivers mediocre food, there's a line that farmers offer in response: We're feeding the world. It's high-tech agriculture's claim to the moral high ground. Farmers say they farm the way they do to produce food as efficiently as possible to feed the world. Charlie Arnot, a former public relations executive for food and farming companies, now CEO of the Center for Food Integrity, says it's more than just a debating point. "U.S. farmers have a tremendous sense of pride in the fact that they've been able to help feed the world," he says. That phrase showed up, for instance, a few weeks ago at a big farm convention in Decatur, Ill. The seed and chemical company DuPont set up a wall with a question printed at the top in big, capital letters: "How are you making a difference to feed the world?" The company invited people to answer that question, and thousands of them did. They wrote things like "raising cattle," "growing corn and beans," "plant as much as possible." Kip Tom, who grows corn and soybeans on thousands of acres of Indiana farmland, says he's very aware of the fact that the world has more and more people, demanding more food. Yet there are fewer and fewer farmers, "and it's the duty of those of us who are left in the business, us family farmers, to help feed that world." That means growing more food per acre, he says, which requires new and better technology: genetically engineered seed, for instance, or pesticides. And this is why the words "feed the world" grate on the nerves of people who believe that large-scale, technology-driven agriculture is bad for the environment and often bad for people. Margaret Mellon, a scientist with the environmental advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, recently wrote an essay in which she confessed to developing an allergy to that phrase. "If there's a controversy, the show-stopper is supposed to be, 'We have to use pesticides, or we won't be able to feed the world!' " she says. Mellon says it's time to set that idea aside. It doesn't answer the concerns that people have about modern agriculture — and it's not even true. American-style farming doesn't really grow food for hungry people, she says. Forty percent of the biggest crop — corn — goes into fuel for cars. Most of the second-biggest crop — soybeans — is fed to animals. Growing more grain isn't the solution to hunger anyway, she says. If you're really trying to solve that problem, there's a long list of other steps that are much more important. "We need to empower women; we need to raise incomes; we need infrastructure in the developing world; we need the ability to get food to market without spoiling." It seemed that this dispute needed a referee. So I called Christopher Barrett, an economist at Cornell University who studies international agriculture and poverty. "They're both right," he says, chuckling. "Sometimes the opposite of a truth isn't a falsehood, but another truth, right?" It's true, he says, that bigger harvests in the U.S. tend to make food more affordable around the world, and "lower food prices are a good thing for poor people." For instance, Chinese pigs are growing fat on cheap soybean meal grown by farmers in the U.S. and Brazil, and that's one reason why hundreds of millions of people in China are eating much better than a generation ago — they can afford to buy pork. So American farmers who grow soybeans are justified in saying that they help feed the world. But Mellon is right, too, Barrett says. The big crops that American farmers send abroad don't provide the vitamins and minerals that billions of people need most. So if the U.S. exports lots of corn, driving down the cost of cornmeal, "it induces poor families to buy lots of cornmeal, and to buy less in the way of leafy green vegetables, or milk," that have the key nutrients. In this case, you're feeding the world, but not solving the nutrition problems. Arnot, from the Center for Food Integrity, recently did a survey, asking consumers whether they think the U.S. even has a responsibility to provide food to the rest of the world. Only 13 percent of these consumers strongly agreed. In focus groups, many people said that if feeding the world means more industrial-scale farming, they're not comfortable with it. This is not a message farmers like to hear. "It is a real sense of frustration for farmers that 'feeding the world' is no longer a message that resonates with the American public," Arnot says. He tells farm groups that they'll have to find another message. They'll need to show that the way they grow food is consistent with the values of American consumers.

Turn: US ag. actually wastes water

Lall 15 (Upmanu Lall: the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering and of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. Columbia Engineering: “Will we run out of fresh water in the 21st century?” copyright date 2015. Accessed June 26^th 2015. http://engineering.columbia.edu/will-we-run-out-fresh-water-21st-century) KalM

In fact, one of the key players in the looming water crisis is agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of global water use on average and more than 90 percent in arid regions. We might be able to dramatically improve the efficiency of water use by improving irrigation systems, by changing the way farmers water their crops, and by changing where different crops are grown. In fact, all these measures will need to be effected even if our sole goal was adaptation to climate change and variability. Agricultural water use efficiency is not much higher in the United States than in many developing countries. Agricultural water pollution due to the way fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides are used is also a significant global factor. We could also improve water use by improving food processing, storage, and delivery as a means of reducing the 30 to 40 percent food loss that currently occurs post agricultural production. With one-third of the developing world expected to confront severe water shortages in this century, this is not a problem that we can ignore or avoid, and we’re working hard at the Columbia Water Center to find answers.

at: air traffic control

No impact to air traffic targeting

Lewis 02 (James Andrew Lewis is the Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Assessing the Risks of Cyber Terrorism, Cyber War and Other Cyber Threats:” http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/021101_risks_of_cyberterror.pdf) KalM

Interference with national air traffic systems to disrupt flights, shut down air transport and endanger passenger and crews is another frequently cited cyber-threat.10 We are not yet at a stage where computer networks operate aircraft remotely, so it is not possible for  CSIS, 2002 5 a cyber-attacker to take over an aircraft. Aircraft still carry pilots who are trained to operate the plane in an emergency. Similarly, the Federal Aviation Authority does not depend solely on computer networks to manage air traffic, nor are its communications dependent on the Internet. The high level of human involvement in the control and decision making process for air traffic reduces the risk of any cyber attack. In a normal month storms, electrical failures and programming glitches all ensure a consistently high level of disruption in air traffic. Pilots and air traffic controllers are accustomed to unexpected disruptions and have adapted their practices to minimize the effect. Airlines and travelers are also accustomed to and expect a high degree of disruption in the system. In the United States, it is normal for 15,000 to 20,000 flights to be delayed or cancelled every month. A cyber attack that degraded the air traffic system would create delays and annoyance, but it would not pose a risk to national security.

at: econ impact

Cyber-attacks don’t threaten econ: empirics

Lewis 02 (James Andrew Lewis is the Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Assessing the Risks of Cyber Terrorism, Cyber War and Other Cyber Threats:” http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/021101_risks_of_cyberterror.pdf) KalM

Manufacturing and economic activity are increasingly dependent on computer networks, and cyber crime and industrial espionage are new dangers for economic activity. However, the evidence is mixed as to the vulnerability of manufacturing to cyber attack. A virus in 2000 infected 1,000 computers at Ford Motor Company. Ford received 140,000 contaminated e-mail messages in three hours before it shut down its network. Email service was disrupted for almost a week within the company. Yet, Ford reported, “the rogue program appears to have caused only limited permanent damage. None of its 114 factories stopped, according to the automaker. Computerized engineering blueprints and other technical data were unaffected. Ford was still able to post information for dealers and auto parts suppliers on Web sites that it uses for that purpose.”12 Companies now report that the defensive measures they have taken meant that viruses that were exceptionally damaging when they first appeared are now only “nuisances.”13

at: emergency response impact

Cyber-attacks don’t threaten emergency response

Lewis 02 (James Andrew Lewis is the Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Assessing the Risks of Cyber Terrorism, Cyber War and Other Cyber Threats:” http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/021101_risks_of_cyberterror.pdf) KalM

The 911 emergency response system, a specialized communications network that relies on local telephone service, is also a favorite target for theorists of cyber-terrorism, but like other infrastructures, it is a robust target. The U.S. for example, does not use a single 911 system in but instead has several thousand local systems using different technologies and procedures. No 911 system in a major city has been hacked. It might be possible to send a flood of email messages instructing people to call 911 for important information and thus overload the system (this was the technique used in the 1997 U.S. cyber exercise “Eligible Receiver”). This sort of technique usually works only once - but made in conjunction with a bombing or other physical attack they could act as a ‘force multiplier’ for a terrorist event.

at: internet impact

Internet take-down isn’t threatened by cyber terror

Lewis 02 (James Andrew Lewis is the Director and Senior Fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Assessing the Risks of Cyber Terrorism, Cyber War and Other Cyber Threats:” http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/021101_risks_of_cyberterror.pdf) KalM

While the Internet may have a few points of failure that offer the possibility for system wide disruption, it was designed to be a robust, distributed communications network capable of continuing operations after a strategic nuclear exchange. Packet switching and Internet protocols were developed to allow communications to be maintained even when  CSIS, 2002 6 some nodes in the network were eliminated and the Internet itself was designed to automatically route around damage to allow for continued communications. Additionally, computer networks rely on a backbone of high capacity telecommunications systems that are relatively secure from cyber-attack. The introduction of new communications technologies also enhances survivability. Wireless and satellite communications also provide some redundancy for landline systems. Most industrial countries now have access to three or four different modes of communications, making the system considerably more robust than it was a decade ago. Increased use of ultra wideband and mesh radio networks will also increase redundancy and survivability against cyber attack in communications networks.