Cybersecurity and Cyber Defense- Dr. Diana Furchtgott Roth

Thank you very much and I understand that my slides are ready to queue up. I'm not, yeah, I understand my slides are ready to queue up. So, I'm going to start. Thank you. Well, I'd like to start by asking all of you a question. I want to ask you how many of you have heard of the movie Lost in Space, Perdidos en el Espacio, from 1998. Well, let me tell you, it's not really worth watching, but I'm glad some of you have heard of it. A family sets off to look for another planet, but a rival reconfigures the spaceship, so it goes off course. So, the family is completely off the grid. And if GPS is lost, we are all going to be off the grid. And I want to know, has this happened to anyone here? Have any of you lost GPS, your navigation system, the global positioning system? Well, Victor, I know that it happened to you, because for 24 hours in Spain last May, the electricity went out and no one had any GPS, global positioning system, positioning, navigation, or timing. Well, what is positioning, navigation, and timing? Well, positioning, navigation, and timing is there's positioning where it's navigation, and you can see where you are. Timing is the feed that you get when you buy, get money out of your ATM. How many of you get money out of your money out of boxes? A few. Yeah, over there. Great. Well, you might not know, but this comes from a system of 32 satellites that are in the ground, that are in the air. There's 32 satellites going around, and they control basically the navigation that you have on your phone, and that you have if you take a taxi. The positioning, so you know where you are from Google Maps, and the timing that tells you your trades, when you get money out of an ATM, and all those other kinds of things. How many of you trade stocks? Yeah, one over here. None of the other rest of you trade stocks. Well, that's probably good to know. These days your money might be safer in cash, and that's from an economist. But those of you who do trade stocks, it's a big difference, not just if it's before the stock market closes, or if the trade is made after, but it's nanoseconds, and that's why timing is very important. Well, PNT matters because it is a source of navigation and timing for all of us, and when I get into an Uber, sometimes I like to say to them, what will happen if your navigation system goes out? And they look at me and they say, GPS can't go out. It can't happen because I have it on my phone. They don't seem to realize that if the satellites go out, none of us have navigation. And you might think there might be some little accident with one satellite, another satellite, but there could be an electromagnetic storm where all the satellites go out. Or, more precisely, for our dealings here, the Russians know how to take out our satellites, the Chinese know how to take out our satellites, the North Koreans know how to take out our satellites. And we can see that there's been spoofing and jamming in Russia and in the Ukraine. We know that EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, her plane when she was landing in Bulgaria, that was spoofed. And these things are becoming more and more common. But we use positioning, navigation, and timing with banks, with electric grids, with cars, trucks, driverless cars. Pilots in planes have GPS receivers that tell them how to avoid hills and where to land. Well, there's growing interference and possibilities of jamming and spoofing. It's possible to buy a jammer just for between $100 and $500 on the internet these days. So anyone can take them and jam anyone else. More sophisticated ones cost more. Those are the ones being used by the military. But there was a big problem in an airport in New Jersey. They found that around lunchtime, the GPS was going out for the planes taking off from Liberty International at Newark Airport. And they couldn't figure out why that happened. Anyway, evidentially, they traced it to a truck. A truck was driving past at that same time every day. And that truck was using a GPS jammer because the driver of the truck was going to visit his girlfriend at lunchtime and didn't want his wife to know where he was going. So he jammed GPS. And there have been other cases of jamming where it's completely accidental. But these days, there's real, very real dangers of it happening. And one example that maybe some of you remember was in 2019, there was a British ship called Sterna Impero in the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians jammed the navigation system to make it think as though it was in international waters. In reality, it was in Iranian waters. The Iranians picked up the British ship. They held it for several months. And they held the whole crew. And it was a big public relations disaster for the British. These days, ships in Finland, the Gulf of Oman, the Emirates, Los Angeles have reported spoofing. And it's very easy to do. It's very easy for foreign militaries to do. This makes truck drivers vulnerable. Agriculture. Agriculture nowadays isn't a matter of just throwing down seeds and throwing down water and throwing down fertilizer. These John Deere tractors have GPS. Every seed goes into a place identified by a global positioning system. Then that little seed is watered. That seed is fertilized. So it's used in agriculture. It's used in building. There's digital maps now. You don't just take a regular map and hammer in a nail or put in a stud. You find out precisely through digital maps where your nail is supposed to go. That reduces errors. It lowers the cost of construction. With so many new electricity sources feeding into the grid, the timing is used for synapses in order to coordinate when the renewables is used. When the natural gas peaker power plant kicks in, it's vital for the electricity grid. So we are now more dependent than we used to be on GPS. It used to be that a cab driver would have a map in his head. How many of you remember? How many of you went to London? You pulled one of these black cabs. The black cab would know where to go. The driver would know. How many of you remember those days when cab drivers actually knew where they were going? These days you can hire anyone. You can put one of these little cell phones in their hands and they can call themselves a driver. But then if the GPS goes down, they don't know where to go. So we are so much more vulnerable because of this change in our workforce. On the one hand, it's great that people with very little knowledge can get jobs and drive. On the other hand, it's a major vulnerability. Well, what we need is backups. We need backups that tell us where we're going. We need for the GPS system to be reinforced. We need it to be backed up. When I was at the Transportation Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Research and Technology, my job was backing up the civilian GPS in the United States of America because the Transportation Department is responsible for backing up civilian GPS, whereas the Defense Department is responsible for backing up military GPS. I had a very large empire under me. I do want to be modest, but I had a billion dollars worth of research under me. I had three offices in different parts of the United States, but about 75 percent of my time was taken on this small, tiny Office of Positioning, Navigation, and Spectrum under me that was working on backing up the global positioning system because it is just so important. We got a lot of different technologies tested. We published a big report that you can still find on the internet in January 2021, testing different technologies, and we found these great technologies that work. Then, just this year, the Transportation Department is finding new technologies to test. There's one especially good one for CARS that I want to tell you about. It's called Tern AI. That's T-E-R-N, as in the bird, Tern AI. It's basically feeding a detailed map into the CARS info system. It was started by a couple of people, special ops forces, dropped behind the lines in Afghanistan in 2014. Their GPS went out regularly, and they had to find their way to where they were going, dodging all the mines. They left the army, and they thought there has to be a better way. They teamed up with the group that built the clear system at the airport that reads a billion faces a second. That's a billion faces a second. They did a very detailed map of the Earth's surface that can be fed into a CARS info system, and then the CARS knows with the movement of its sensors where it is going. Full disclosure, I'm on the advisory board of this company, because it's such a great new technology and so inexpensive. Only $50 to $100 per car, no subscription required. It updates itself automatically. As people buy a new car, then it gets updated, and it feeds automatically into the CARS navigation system. If you're driving along and GPS goes out, and you're using Google Maps, it switches to Google Maps. If you're driving along and you're using Waze, it switches to Waze. This is a really brilliant new technology. Then there's a timing technology with a company called Hop Truck. This links, instead of to the satellites, it links to atomic clocks. There are atomic clocks in different parts of the world, like Greenwich in London, like the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Some in Colorado. It links to these atomic clocks. We have ways of backing up positioning and navigation timing without relying on these satellites. Ships, for example, can localize with low Earth orbit satellites, or by pinging off Starlink satellites, or by pinging off AM radio waves. There's a great new center at Ohio State, run by Zach Cassis, who's working on these kinds of things. Let's move to the role of parliamentarians. You are parliamentarians, and the question is, what should you do? How many of you parliamentarians before knew that taking out GPS was a vulnerability in your country? I'm glad I've communicated something new. It is critical. It needs backups. It needs coordination between countries. One thing you could do is require that certain entities in your countries have backups. You don't have to say what the technology is, but you could require them to have backups, or you could require them to reveal whether they have backups. When a car is sold, it has to say, does it have a backup? When an electrical grid or a telecom provider operates, they have to say, are you backed up against GPS, or are you not backed up against GPS? And that's one way to get it started. You require transparency and disclosure, then competition will mean that these different entities will come up with the solutions themselves. You could also require it to have in government vehicles, fire engines, police, ambulance, because what you don't want is to have GPS go out, and then the ambulance cannot find its way to your home, or the fire truck cannot find its way to that school where there's a fire. You want to make sure that your government vehicles are backed up, and with the TURN AI system, it only costs $50 to $100 per vehicle. Well, I want to end with another movie. There's another movie, a James Bond movie called Tomorrow Never Dies, El Mañana Nunca Muere. How many of you have heard of El Mañana Nunca Muere, Tomorrow Never Dies, James Bond? It's a really good movie. And the villain uses a GPS device, fictional back then because it was 1998, to send the British ship HMS Devonshire off course to Vietnamese waters in the South China Sea. Then it sinks, and then it gets attacked, which looks like an unprovoked Chinese attack, almost starting a world war, and James Bond has to come to the rescue to sort it out, which, of course, he does. Well, we don't have James Bond now, but we all have to be our own James Bonds. We have to guard against the GPS hacking and spoofing. We have to make sure that the enemies of Western civilization do not manage to take down our economies by eliminating our GPS, by eliminating these 32 satellites. We have to make sure that it's backed up, and that's something you as parliamentarians are capable of doing. We have the technology now, and I'm happy to be a source of advice to any of you who need it. Thank you.