Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World Page #6

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and create outages in our power grid

and disruptions for our satellites.

What the f***?

New York City.

What Hurricane Sandy caused here

could happen on a worldwide

scale and much worse.

No electricity, no internet,

no drinking water, no flushing of toilets,

no gas and no shopping.

All you could see was the outline

of the hospital against a darkened sky.

A lone flashlight up in one

of the hospital rooms there

as doctors and nurses rushed

from patient to patient.

Out front, ambulances.

These images from my iPhone

as we approach the hospital,

just one of the nearly

300 patients who were

one by one brought out and taken to safety.

What we got going on here is a complete

blackout in New York City, and um...

I'm on the third floor of Clear Channel

where Z100, KTU, Lite FM, Q,

we're all located on the third floor.

Every station is off the

air in New York City.

I don't think it's ever happened in the

history of broadcasting in New York.

It's like a Will Smith movie, man.

It's very weird. Very weird.

And I feel kind of helpless because

I'm glad I'm here and I'm safe,

but there's a lot of crap going on at home.

My neighbors tell me it's a big mess.

So I'm nervous about what I'm

gonna head home to tomorrow.

Wassup?

This is a control room.

Meet Lawrence Krauss.

As a cosmologist

he is studying the origins of our universe.

Much of his attention

has been focused on our planet.

If there's a solar flare...

if you destroyed the information

fabric of the world right now,

modern civilization would collapse.

Hundreds of millions of people will die.

Billions of people will die.

The world will become,

for people like you and me,

unimaginably ugly, difficult, and...

there's great likelihood

that I couldn't survive.

If the internet shuts down,

people will not remember how

they used to live before that.

I start to think of Maslow's

hierarchy of needs.

I mean, let's get back

to the base of the pyramid

and think about food and shelter.

You have food networks

that are hugely dependent

on being able to route digitally

what the needs are and where

and, through efficiencies created

when the network is working well,

you don't have warehouses near people

stocked to the brim with food.

If you disrupt those networks I imagine,

what do they say?

"Civilization is always about four

square meals away from utter ruin"?

That's something

that it wouldn't be bad to prepare for.

As we've thought about

an internet of things

where often for purely,

looked at at this moment,

unnecessary reasons,

we not only attach daily

objects to the internet

but make them reliant on

that internet connection

in order to function properly.

So the idea that our standard appliances

couldn't work without connectivity,

that we wouldn't be able to get...

to a restaurant that in turn would be able

to get to food and to organize staff...

I suspect, however,

that some individuals will survive.

Let us remember that we

come from a background where

at one point

there were less than a thousand

individuals alive,

probably down in the

southern part of Africa,

and we were a hair's breadth away

from disappearing as a species.

We have no control over

what the sun chooses to do.

We do know that there is a solar cycle,

so there are times of high activity

when there are many flares and

there are times of low activity

when there are relatively few.

Events like the Carrington Event appear to

be fairly uncommon but not non-existent,

they're not single isolated events.

We do see that flares are repeatable,

it's just that the large ones are

less common than the small ones.

So by observing other stars actually

we can get some idea

of how frequently these things happen

and it seems to be

every few hundred years or so.

So it's really a matter of time

before we have a large solar flare.

- Um, not a matter of...

- it's when.

Yes, not a matter "if"

we'll have a large solar flare.

Will we disappear as a species?

Again, Werner, I can't tell you

because I don't make predictions.

It would be...

unimaginably bad

and I prefer to not think

about it right now.

Las Vegas, Nevada.

One of the casinos is

preparing to host DefCon,

the annual convention

of the hacker community.

In less than two decades it has grown

to 20,000 participants.

At least a thousand of them will be FBI,

the CIA, Chinese secret service,

and other interested parties.

We are about to meet Kevin Mitnick,

a demigod among the community of hackers.

Just mentioning his name here

makes everyone fall silent in awe.

Am I proud of being

the world's most famous hacker?

Um... It's a title that's

kind of cool to have,

but I had a lot of trials and tribulations

to get to that point.

A lot of bad things happened in my life, like,

for example, going to a federal prison.

So it's a title that was earned,

but I took the hard road.

When I was a federal fugitive

I was really concerned obviously

about getting arrested

so what I did is I hacked

into the cell phone company,

one of the cell phone

companies in Los Angeles,

and through what we call metadata...

It's interesting because nowadays

with the revelations of Edward Snowden,

he talked about metadata

being very critical

in the NSA's ability to

track us and surveil us

and the NSA says, oh, it's only metadata,

it doesn't mean anything.

Let me tell you

how I was able to use metadata

to track the FBI in the 1990s.

I was able to hack into

the cell phone company

and I was able to identify

the phone numbers that belonged

to the FBI white collar crime

squad in Los Angeles.

And I was able to look at their...

I couldn't get the contents of the call

but I could see who they called

and who called them

so I was able to get a lot of intelligence.

And then what I was able to do is,

through this device, I was

able to program this device

with all the FBI cell phone numbers

of the people that were

in charge of my investigation.

It would start sending me pager alerts

that the FBI cell phone is here,

you know, within a mile.

So what I did that night is

I took all my computer stuff:

my floppy disk, my CDs,

anything that's technology related...

I put it at a friend's house and then I went

to Winchell's Donuts and I got a big...

I think it was a 24 box

of, you know, donuts.

I took a Sharpie and

wrote "FBI Donuts" on the box,

I put it in the refrigerator and on a big

post-it note outside the refrigerator

you know the logo for

Intel says "Intel inside"?

I put "FBI donuts inside" and

stuck it on the refrigerator.

And it just so happens at 6:00 that morning

I wake up... And how I wake up is

I hear somebody jiggling the door.

The FBI knocks, they don't jiggle doors,

and I go "who is it?" just instinctively

because I thought someone

was trying to break in.

"FBI, open up! Open up!"

And they're looking for

anything electronic...

a computer, a cell phone,

and nothing's there.

And as soon as one of the guys

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