Lynne Kiesling
In March I wrote about Adam Thierer’s paper on technopanics — “a moral panic centered on societal fears about a particular contemporary technology” — and I argued that we should bear the moral panic phenomenon in mind when evaluating objections to smart grid technologies. In the past two weeks we’ve seen news articles on this topic: according to the FBI, smart meter cybersecurity is loose enough that hackers have been able to hack into smart meters and steal electricity.
Chris King from eMeter has done some digging into this question, and writes at Earth2Tech suggesting that the problem is old-fashioned criminal human behavior, not any technology-specific security failure:
Upon a closer look, this situation is not so much about smart meters as it is about criminal human behavior. Former Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs explained that it was not actually the smart meters themselves which were “hacked.” The meters’ own security measures were not breached.
Instead, criminals accessed the smart meters by stealing meter passwords as well as some devices used to program the meters. This is more like stealing a key and opening a door, rather than breaking the lock on the door.
These criminals were former employees of the utility involved, and of the vendor who provided the smart meters. These people were paid (bribed) by customers to illegally reprogram the meters so that those meters would record less energy consumption than actually occurred. This is not fundamentally different from bribing human meter readers to under report consumption — which happens often in some developing countries.
Which brings us back to Adam’s original point: why are we so willing to accept the technopanic argument? Why are so many people so suspicious of new technology, and so willing to give up both the consequentialist potential benefits and the moral defense of individual liberty and impose controls and limits on technology?