by Ted Koppel
Blaine Maxfield is the church’s chief information officer. After giving me an exhaustive rundown of the church’s emergency communications planning (which runs the gamut from Internet and social media and texting to those carefully distributed satellite phones and ham radios), Maxfield reaffirmed that no contingency exists for the church’s own defense. “None of our plans contemplate, from our perspective, us defending ourselves. We’re relying on all government agencies, really, to help protect our members of the church.” Maxfield defended this position wholeheartedly, adding, “We’re suggesting that each individual member, they rely on their relationship with their Father in Heaven and know exactly what best to do. And I know that might sound trite to you, but it isn’t. From our perspective, we believe that they’ll know exactly what to do to help with their families.”
This is a church that provides precise guidance on almost all matters declining to take a position on what is clearly among the most controversial of issues. This is a church that all but demands self-sufficiency from its members urging a passive reliance on law enforcement agencies and government. Is it possible to square that circle, to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable? Well, sort of. As Maxfield suggested, the answers came from individual members. Christopher Jameson Taggert and Elizabeth Stoddard Taggert live in Cody. They met at Brigham Young University on their first day at school. “My mom told me I shouldn’t date him,” Elizabeth told me, “because I would end up living in a small town in Wyoming, which is exactly what happened.” They have been living in Cody—“very happily,” said Elizabeth—for the last twenty-seven years. Christopher’s great-grandfather was among a number of Mormon settlers lured out to Cody by Buffalo Bill more than a hundred years ago with a promise of free water rights. There is now a thriving LDS community in Cody, and disaster preparation, Elizabeth recalled, has been a lively topic of discussion in their ward.
“We just had a list that went around the church just within the last month, and they were asking us to list our resources. They wanted to know, basically, just who has a flatbed, who has generators, who has, maybe, some gasoline stored, who has a well, what kind of talents they have that we could—who can sew, who can, you know, help in case of an emergency.” What doesn’t seem to come up in these church-initiated conversations is the subject of protecting resources.
“So what happens,” I asked, “if some people show up at your front door, and some of them may even be carrying weapons, and they say ‘give us what you’ve got’? What’s your response?”
Chris answered, “ ‘Come take it.’ You know, in our faith, I don’t think this is a physical commandment. I think it’s a spiritual commandment. I think the Lord’s saying, ‘Do this so that if something happens you will be prepared, but I think the real test is how you treat the stranger that comes knocking at your door.’ ”
They didn’t budge, even when I pressed the issue. “What if the number grows, and there are thousands of starving people, and the word gets out: ‘Chris and Elizabeth are really good people. All you have to do is knock on the door. They’ll give you a week’s supply of food’?”
“I can imagine myself in the situation,” said Elizabeth, “and I can imagine weeping as I was giving my wheat away to people, knowing that it might mean that we would not be able to survive as long. But I also cannot imagine turning away hungry people when we have food at our house to share.”
“If you think that this life is all there is,” added Christopher, “it’s catastrophic. We believe that there will be a resurrection, that you will live again. So, in a sense, the worst thing in life is not death.”
It’s not easy maintaining a cynical outlook in the face of what appears to be a thoroughly charitable mindset, but a lifetime as a journalist is something of a defense mechanism. The Taggerts do not have a houseful of guns. Many Mormons do, and they, at least, are not under the impression that their church leadership back in Salt Lake City has issued any directive preventing the use of those weapons.
Henry Kissinger liked to call it “constructive ambiguity.” As a diplomatic device, it provides the kind of language that permits both sides to an agreement to attach subtle but significant differences of interpretation to language that has been left deliberately vague. In this instance, church leaders have repeatedly and emphatically refused to spell out any defensive measures or preparations—yet neither have they issued any prohibitions against them. This is not a matter of oversight. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will never be confused with a congregation of Unitarians; the Saints are quite explicit about what is permissible behavior and what is not. In every other aspect of disaster preparation, LDS leaders stress cooperation with the state and collaboration with its agencies, but never surrendering the initiative. The church runs its own affairs. If it wanted to rule out the use of guns for any purpose other than hunting, it would do so. Instead, in Blaine Maxfield’s words, the church “is suggesting that each individual member rely on their relationship with their Father in heaven and know exactly what best to do.”
“Did they show you the manual that the church puts out?” Stanley Wolz, also a Mormon living in Cody, Wyoming, raised the question in the context of our conversation about self-defense in a time of crisis. “It’s about that thick,” Stan said, holding his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, “and it covers everything—shelf life, how to store, how to can it, whatever to do. This last version of it was the first time I’ve seen mention of a firearm in there, and it didn’t say what to have a firearm for. It just said you should think about having a firearm. So I think, personally, that their direction probably was for food gathering, if you were in an area where you could actually hunt. But…”
“But it’s not clear what it’s for,” I said. “It’s ambiguous.”
“It was there,” said Stan.
Constructive ambiguity.
19
Solutions
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.
— H. L. MENCKEN
Not even the Mormons have focused particular attention on preparing for the aftermath of a disabled grid. Their emphasis on disaster preparation adapts to local and regional realities but remains agnostic as to the precise nature of an impending catastrophe. In this respect their approach mirrors that of the Department of Homeland Security, which also generalizes its recommendations. That, however, is where the similarity ends.
Homeland Security proposes that families settle on a predetermined meeting place and that they equip themselves with sufficient food, water, appropriate clothing, money, and medicine to survive seventy-two hours—and yes, of course, the radio, a flashlight, and adequate batteries for both. It is not nearly enough. It is based on outdated assumptions that are barely adequate in the wake of natural disasters. The loss of electricity for tens of millions of people, extending over many weeks, requires something altogether different. The greater the level of self-sufficiency and the larger the number of social networks able to function independently for at least a week or two, the more successful government relief efforts will ultimately be.
The LDS church has established a model that makes good common sense, one that serves to support families in times of illness or unemployment, natural disaster or international crisis. It is designed to cushion families during hard times over an extended period. Certainly most families cannot afford to immediately lay in a six-month supply of food and water. Too many families lack the resources to meet even their daily needs. But if those who can afford it take on the responsibility of longer-term survival, supplies available to emergency management agencies can be reserved for the very neediest. Many urban dwellers, living in small urban apartments, lack space, but when what’s at stake is survival, it’s astonishing how much can be tucked away in small spaces. To establish a foundation with long-lasting, nourishing foods that have sustained needy families for generations—rice, wheat berries (and the grinder to make flour), beans—and large containers
of water seems ridiculous in times of plenty, but it can become the difference between survival and starvation during an extended crisis. True, the wheat berries and grinder are not likely to find many converts among city dwellers, but the goal is to build up a supply of nonperishable goods, small amounts at a time. These are measures to be undertaken gradually, over time. Eventually the supplies become part of a natural pattern—rotation of the older food into a pattern of daily consumption, always to be replaced with fresh supplies.
What will, for most people, be the most difficult to replicate in the Mormon experience, however, is the intricately organized community, existing on both the local and national levels. There are well over two thousand Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) throughout the country. They are affiliated with FEMA and provide a useful structure for implementing disaster relief, but they don’t have much of a presence in America’s cities. There is, for example, only one CERT in the nation’s capital. Still, it is a place to start, and if you go to the CERT website, you will find the name and contact information for the organization nearest you. Many religious communities already have a structure and sense of connection in place, as do any number of social and civic organizations. Some of these have already made thorough preparations for disaster relief. For those that have not, but where organization and a sense of community are in place, it should be a relatively manageable matter to modify what already exists.
Many of us have lost the art of neighborliness. What comes more easily to rural communities has atrophied in urban apartment complexes. But the directions for even loose associations are relatively simple: locate and establish the needs of the most vulnerable, determine the skills and assets of those willing to share either or both. (I know, it comes dangerously close to the old Marxist dictum “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Desperate times call for desperate measures.) Once disaster strikes, it is already too late. This may be an ideal opportunity to simultaneously address a potential crisis and an existing need. At a time when many police and sheriff’s departments have become alienated from the communities they serve, law enforcement officers have an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to protecting the people they serve. Law enforcement, fire departments, and teams of emergency medical workers are the ideal agencies to draw communities together in disaster preparedness. The social catastrophes that will emerge in the wake of a successful cyberattack on a grid will not easily lend themselves to grassroots solutions. But when a population’s mindset is focused on social connections and basic solutions, it lays a foundation on which government can build. As history demonstrates, and as we will see in a later chapter, preparation, even when misdirected, produces unexpected dividends.
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There is, unfortunately, a whiff of defeatism about preparation. It implies the inevitability of an impending catastrophe when time, effort, and money might more proactively be expended on prevention. The one should not preclude the other; the overall utility of preparing for hard times, with a rotating larder, participation in a social network, and the establishment of a financial safety net, is eminently adaptable and useful even in the absence of catastrophe. On the other hand, defending against a cyberattack is something that only a coalition between government and industry can even attempt. So it is to be expected, perhaps, that government’s primary emphasis remains on prevention.
As is so often the case when we find ourselves confronting intractable problems, committees are formed. In July 2014 SIFMA, the trade group that represents the money industry—banks plus asset management and securities firms—“proposed a government-industry cyber war council to stave off terrorist attacks.” SIFMA retained former NSA director Keith Alexander to facilitate the joint effort, which would bring together industry executives and deputy-level representatives from at least eight federal agencies. As outlined in an earlier chapter, CEOs from the electric power industry already meet three times a year with senior White House officials as part of what is called the Electric Sector Coordinating Council. This outreach to the federal government is a measure of rising alarm in the ranks of industry and big business, but it is only in the past year or so that the fear of government interference appears to be losing ground to the need for government protection. We are in a period of dynamic change.
Widespread recognition of the vulnerability of our power grids already exists. Lots of smart people are already offering partial remedies and grappling with solutions. But there is not yet widespread recognition that we have entered a new age in which we are profoundly vulnerable in ways that we have never known before, and so there is neither a sense of national alarm nor the leadership to take us where we need to go. Our national leaders are in a precarious place. They recognize the scale of danger that a successful cyberattack represents. However, portraying it too graphically without having developed practical solutions runs the obvious risk of simply provoking public hysteria. For the moment, we are immersed in partial solutions. Industry and government are creeping toward an alliance of sorts. It comes in the wake of daily cyberattacks and probes, and of having already spent billions of dollars on cybersecurity.
Policy and public awareness aside, cybersecurity experts are still in the early stages of wrestling with notions of a strategy to deal with cyber threats, something like the strategy that developed to deal with nuclear threats. Former CIA director David Petraeus argued that analyzing the possible flash points between two blocs of nuclear powers was relatively easy. Developing a strategy that takes potentially thousands of players into account is infinitely more complex.
When Keith Alexander retired as director of the NSA, he opened up offices for IronNet Cybersecurity, Inc., in downtown Washington. One of the imponderables in our system of government is how rapidly and easily secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, high-ranking military officers, congressmen, senators—indeed, even former presidents of the United States—are, upon departing office, able to transform their expertise, their experience, their contacts into extraordinarily high fees, contracts, and lucrative new businesses. Alexander’s qualifications are unquestioned, but in a vibrant democracy, accusations of unseemly haste were inevitable.
That was certainly the thrust of a July 2014 article in the Atlantic titled “Keith Alexander’s Unethical Get-Rich-Quick Plan?” Perhaps the question mark was intended to leave a shred of doubt, but a sense of outrage vibrated throughout the piece: “While responsible for countering cybersecurity threats to America,” Conor Friedersdorf wrote, “Alexander presides over what he characterizes as staggering cyber-thefts and hugely worrisome security vulnerabilities. After many years, he retires. And immediately, he has a dramatically better solution to this pressing national-security problem, one he never implemented in government but plans to patent and sell!”
Friedersdorf’s implication was that Alexander is offering for vast profit a cybersecurity plan that he failed to develop while in the service of his country, and that he is utilizing the classified information that was once available to him. On the face of it, the suspicion and even the outrage are not unreasonable. But the actual answer is considerably less duplicitous and certainly less dramatic. At least—and not surprisingly—that is the impression Alexander gave when he sketched out the plan to me.
There are, as previously noted, more than three thousand electric power companies in the United States. Many of the smaller electric companies lack the resources and often the motivation to provide their operations with the best cybersecurity. Computer access to any one of them can provide access along the network to the SCADA and EMS systems that calibrate supply and demand for the grid as a whole. In theory, the government’s most sophisticated intelligence gathering programs could monitor every single operation of every power company, every bank, every airline—in short, every critical industry in the country, alerting each industry to every incoming probe or attack. But to do so would be to violate every last vestige of Fourth Amendment or privacy protection.
Alexander is proposing something that would be the equivalent, he said, of a home protection service like ADT. For a monthly fee, ADT installs a burglar alarm system, cameras, fire detection equipment, and other devices of your choosing. “You don’t have a security guy sitting in your basement and a cop and a fireman and all those,” said Alexander. “You couldn’t afford it.” The way these home security systems work is that if there’s a break-in, a gas leak, or a fire in your residence, sensors or cameras convey the information to a control center, which in turn calls the police or the fire department. In Keith Alexander’s ideal world, his company would be running a cyber equivalent to the home security control center, monitoring the overlapping power company networks. He says, “That op center would see who’s trying to get into any one of those, and then the issue is, can the op center share that with the government and with other entities in that sector?”
