The Fifth Risk

What was most easily imagined was not what was most probable. It wasn’t the things you think of when you try to think of bad things happening that got you killed, he said. “It is the less detectable, systemic risks.” Another way of putting this is: the risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t. Which b

One senior official at the Department of Commerce at the time was struck by how far this one company in the private sector had intruded into what was, in the end, a matter of public safety. “You’re essentially taking a public good that’s been paid for with taxpayer dollars and restricting it to the privileged few who want to make money off it,” he

We don’t really celebrate the accomplishments of government employees. They exist in our society to take the blame. But if anyone ever paid attention, they would note that Woteki’s department, among other achievements, had suppressed the potentially catastrophic 2015 outbreak of bird flu. They’d created, very quickly, a fast new test for the diseas

“I worked in the little box in the government most responsible for helping the people who elected Trump,” said Salerno. “And they literally took my little box off the organization chart.”

“The idea that if you push a network a certain way it might collapse. Is the network stable or unstable? It’s a lot like the question I was asking about weather forecasts.” A terrorist network, like a thunderstorm, might be chaotic. Terrorist networks, along with a lot of other security matters, might be better understood through chaos theory. “If

The dystopic endgame is not difficult to predict: the day you get only the weather forecast you pay for. A private company will become better than the Weather Service at knowing where a hurricane will make landfall: What will it do with that information? Tell the public or trade it inside a hedge fund?

The federal government offers the only hope of a coordinated, intelligent response to threats to the system: there is no private-sector mechanism. To that end the DOE had begun to gather the executives of the utility companies, to educate them about the threats they face. “They all sort of said, ‘But is this really real?’” said MacWilliams. “You ge

DJ could see that this progress was a big deal. A world-historic event. Here you could see chaos theory dramatized, but in reverse. You could rewind history and consider how things might have come out differently if our ability to predict the weather had been even a tiny bit better, or worse. “The failed hostage rescue in Iran was caused by a sands

Chris Christie was sitting on a sofa beside Donald Trump when Pennsylvania was finally called. It was one thirty-five in the morning, but that wasn’t the only reason the feeling in the room was odd. Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him. “You got what you wanted, Mike,” she said, “now leave me alone.” She wouldn’t so