Watch RF CONZ hold YOUR infrastructure hostage

[Decepticon]

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- With less than two weeks before federal money runs out for transportation projects across the country, a partisan showdown is developing between Senate Democrats and House Republicans over passing a new bill.

The standoff, based on sharply differing views about the overall expense of the bill and how to pay for it, jeopardizes thousands of road and bridge construction projects.

On Wednesday, House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica, R-Florida, said the House would soon pass a three-month extension of existing funding to provide time for negotiations over a longer-term bill.

But that idea was rejected by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who said Tuesday he was "inclined not to" pass a temporary funding extension. Instead, Reid said House Republicans should accept a two-year, $109 billion bill that recently passed the Senate with broad bipartisan support.

Reid said tea party activists are to blame for the House's refusal to consider the Senate bill.
Rep. Paul Ryan on GOP budget plan
Rep. Paul Ryan on GOP budget plan

"Millions of people depend on this highway bill that has passed the Senate on a bipartisan basis," Reid said. "They depend on it for their jobs. But it seems to me that the House has come to the conclusion, led by the House leadership, that they can't do anything unless they get a permission slip from the tea party."

Asked about Reid's refusal to consider a short-term bill, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, said Reid is taking a risk.

"I'm sure that Majority Leader Reid does not want to cause any disruption in the flow of transportation dollars to the states or into the federal programs," Cantor said.

House passage of a temporary bill could put Democrats under enormous pressure not to let funding dry up. Permitting thousands of construction jobs to go idle, just as the economy begins to recover, could backfire on lawmakers, especially those seeking re-election.

House GOP leaders are having trouble getting enough support for their five-year, roughly $260 billion version of the usually popular bill, partly because fiscal conservatives say it's too expensive and should be scaled back. House Democrats, meanwhile, say the bill is a non-starter because it calls for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said recently it was possible that the House would take up the Senate bill, partially as a way to try to persuade wavering Republicans to come around and support the House GOP version. A three-month extension would give Boehner and his lieutenants more time to try again to round up votes.

"A short-term extension will give us time to build support for real, long-term reforms, including linking transportation funding to expanded American energy production -- which would lower costs, reduce our dependence on foreign energy, and create millions of American jobs," Boehner's spokesman, Michael Steel, said.

Mica told reporters the House is expected to vote on the short-term measure next week before it leaves for a two-week recess.
Standoff in Congress threatens highway construction funding - CNN.com


Why a three month extension ? Why not pass the Senate version? Oh, because you need time to round up votes. Boner's spokesman even says it.

Is THIS the way you do business? Three month extensions? If you can't legislate in the interests of the people you are supposed to be serving because you are too busy playing petty politics, perhaps you should re-evaluate why you are in public office and ask why anyone would be STUPID enough to vote for people who act so selfishly.

 

[Oddball]

A three month extension was good enough when your Boiking wanted to use one for the FICA tax cut.

Two-faced nincompoop.

 

[waltky]

Infrastructure systems vulnerable online...

How to hack a nation's infrastructure
19 May 2013 - I'm watching a live video feed of people visiting a cafe in London.

It's a small, busy place and is doing a good trade in tea, coffee and cakes. That woman has dropped some money. A child is running around. Later, another customer thinks they have got the wrong change. Nothing too gripping, you might think, except that the feed should be private, seen only by the cafe's managers. Somebody forgot to click a box so now anyone who knows where to look can watch.

That CCTV feed is just one of many inadvertently put online. Finding them has got much easier thanks to search engines such as Shodan that scour the web for them. It catalogues hundreds every day. "Shodan makes it easier to perform attacks that were historically difficult due to the rarity of the systems involved," Alastair O'Neill from the Insecurety computer security research collective told the BBC. "Shodan lowers the cost of enumerating a network and looking for specific targets."

Control systems for dams, industrial plants and building controls are increasingly being found online

It is not just CCTV that has been inadvertently exposed to public scrutiny. Search engines are revealing public interfaces to huge numbers of domestic, business and industrial systems. Mr O'Neill and other researchers have found public control interfaces for heating systems, geo-thermal energy plants, building control systems and manufacturing plants.

Remote work

The most worrying examples are web-facing controls for "critical infrastructure" - water treatment systems, power plants and traffic control systems. "There's a tremendous amount of stuff out there right now," said Kyle Wilhoit, a threat researcher from Trend Micro who specialises in seeking out those exposed systems and helping them improve their defences. Mr Wilhoit said such control systems, which often go by the name of Scada (supervisory control and data acquisition), get put online for many different reasons. Often, he said, the elements of such critical systems were in far-flung places and it was much cheaper to keep an eye on them via the internet than to send an engineer out.

Many industrial systems are networked because they are in remote locations

It's not just finding these systems that is a danger. Security experts are finding lots of holes in the software they run that, in the hands of a skilled attacker, can be exploited to grant unauthorised access. "For attackers, the potential pay-off for compromising these systems is very high," said Mr Wilhoit. Governments are turning their attention to increasingly public vulnerabilities in such critical systems. The US Department of Homeland Security has established a computer emergency response team that deals solely with threats to industrial control systems. In the UK, government cash has been made available to help intelligence agencies and law enforcement deal with cyberthreats.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said cyber-attacks were one of the "top four" threats to the UK's national security. "Billions of pounds are being lost to the UK economy from cybercrime each year, including from intellectual property theft and cyber-espionage," he said. "Industry is by far the biggest victim." The spokesman added that government was working with industry to harden critical infrastructure against attack, and had set up a series of initiatives to share information about threats and the best way to tackle them.

Bad decisions