A minor glitch in a software update last week caused chaos for the banking industry, airlines, and hundreds of millions of people across the globe. Plus, according to AT&T, the company recently suffered a massive data breach that exposed call and text message data for almost all of their customers. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A minor glitch in the software update last week caused chaos for the banking industry. Airlines and hundreds of millions of people across the globe could not get where they wanted to go. This massive outage could have been avoided, but the company’s responsible have sent millions convincing regulators to back off. We’re doing fine. We don’t need any help. We don’t need any regulations. Well, look, it’s so apparent. You’ve got Microsoft that is trying to blame this on.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They’re saying the CrowdStrike update.
Mike Papantonio: The CrowdStrike. Yeah. Okay. Well, no, that is nonsense. The truth is, the federal government said to Microsoft, and they said to Amazon, and they said to Google, you guys have a big problem because you own everything. There’s no diversity in the cloud system. Everything’s going into the cloud and being controlled by companies that don’t have the capacity to do it. And they said, no, if you do that, you’re gonna interfere with innovation. We’ve got this. Don’t worry about this regulator. We’ve got it under control. You think back, it was the same thing with railroads. This is the closest to the railroad monopoly that I’ve ever seen. And for some reason, we act like it’s different. It’s exactly the same thing. They need to be busted up. You can’t have these people controlling all this.
Farron Cousins: Right. The FTC has been on Microsoft’s back for over a year telling them, hey, this is gonna cause a problem. We really need to have some hearings about this. We need you guys to respond. And every Microsoft response was, you guys are overreacting. Everything is perfectly fine. Who do you think you’re talking to here? We’ve got this under control. In fact, as recently as two days before the outage, the federal regulators were warning, something horrible is going to happen because you have not diversified. It is so consolidated that something as simple as a software update crippled the world.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, understand, an update. This was run the update and everything stopped. And the point, this is a massive threat to the economy.
Farron Cousins: It is.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, if somebody figured out how to make this an element of war, we’d be in big trouble.
Farron Cousins: Well, and I guarantee you, after seeing what happened, they’re working on it. They absolutely are working on it.
Mike Papantonio: No question. So you have this argument, you can’t regulate us. We’re so smart. We have a security system. They knew they didn’t have a security system. Matter of fact, it showed they didn’t want to spend money on the security system. It would’ve cost them too much money to do what the government was telling ’em to do. You have to have a security system. And they lied, basically. They absolutely made up this lie that we’ve got it under control. There’s nothing to worry about and that the consolidation of our companies, there should be no limits. If it’s Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, we should be able to control the world of tech. And you see how dangerous this is. It’s just so freaking dangerous.
Farron Cousins: Well, honestly, I think you bring up a really great point here with the arrogance of these companies. Look, we’re the tech guys. We’re so much smarter than everybody else. You can’t sit there in Washington, DC, with your law degree and tell us how to run a tech company. You don’t know anything about this. Well, they know enough to have warned you for years that this would happen. You dismissed it and then it happened. But they’ve also spent so many millions of dollars lobbying these same organizations and lawmakers to not do anything about it, that it probably would’ve been cheaper just to invest in the security than buying everybody off.
Mike Papantonio: That’s an interesting point. If you look at the multi-millions of dollars that they paid to politicians to make ’em vote their way. And you just said, okay, let’s regroup on that. Could we have done what the government was telling us we needed to do? That we needed a security system and had we not lied to them about, yes, we have a security system. That all this consolidation and all this power being held up in the handful of service cloud service providers, if they had been honest, and if they had just taken that money and made it work, we’d had never had this problem. You’re not gonna change this unless you sue them and I think that’s what’s coming. I think you’re gonna see some big lawsuits on loss of business that, matter of fact, we’re being asked to do that. We’re being asked to handle some of these big companies that say, look, they cost us gazillions of dollars. I mean, look at the airline industry. They’re still don’t have it under control. So, as this progresses, it’s gonna probably take a couple of more events like this, hopefully not as serious as this, but a couple of more events before anybody starts paying attention.
Mike Papantonio: And then you have AT&T. According to AT&T, the company recently suffered a massive data breach that exposed calls and text messages. It exposed all that data about all of their customers. This massive breach wasn’t even a blip on the media’s radar, but hundreds of millions of people have been violated and they don’t even know what happened. Well, the reason the media didn’t report is because the mainstream media or corporate media, it’s not mainstream anymore. I wish they’d do away with that term, mainstream media. It’s not. It’s far from it. But they wouldn’t tell this story because the advertising.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: The advertising is monstrous that AT&T is paying MSNBC and CNN and Fox and CBS, ABC, they’re paying so much money that they weren’t about to do a story. This is a serious story.
Farron Cousins: It it really is because this is not, like you said, okay, it’s not just, uh-oh, some data got out. Every customer, if you have AT&T, I have AT&T, my data was part of this. Everybody who has AT&T your data was part of this. They got your call logs, they got your text message logs. Now the company swears, they didn’t get the content of your text messages.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, they got enough.
Farron Cousins: But they got your location data. I mean, this is gonna be used by, probably improperly, I imagine by police. Right? Uh-oh, look, we got you talking to this guy. We got you in this location where a crime was committed. This is horrible and has horrible ramifications. But the personal data itself, and nobody knows that this happened, this was a big news. And honestly, this is a one page story. I mean, my God, this is such a huge data breach, one of the biggest in the history of data.
Mike Papantonio: But it’s just like everything about dysfunctional corporate media right now. Can you imagine choosing, having the guys in the top office say, no, don’t do this story because these people pay so much money for advertising.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: We’ve seen it firsthand. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it firsthand. They’ll make the call, you better kill this story, or else. Matter of fact, my daughter, Sara’s working on a case, a baby formula case that is killing preemie children. Okay. There was a $60 million verdict in the case. And so Fox said, yeah, this is a big story. People ought to know that you got a product out there that’s killing people. But it was Abbott. It was these companies that make this stuff that advertise so much on their station. They killed the story. They killed it like, a week before they were supposed to do it. So this is just another example. And then I guess the thing that really is concerning, they say, well, they don’t actually have your social security numbers or your date of birth. Can you imagine how easy it is to find that with just these little traces of information that they take from your calls and your texts? I mean, it’s just a ridiculous argument. And the other part of it is we’re, as taxpayers, we’re having to pay the feds to go out and do all this investigation and find out what happened. And AT&T, they, what the hell? They don’t care. The feds are spending the money, taxpayers are spending the money, to stop all this. They’re not spending a dime from the standpoint of really making this a safe system.
Farron Cousins: Well, and thanks to the Patriot Act, they don’t ever punish any of these tech companies for the massive data breaches because they rely on them when they need to kinda skirt what’s legal and what’s not, because we’ve been covering that for 20 years now.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Talk about that. People don’t get that, this symbiotic relationship between the feds and these companies.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And again, we have covered this for 20 years now, the fact that these telecom companies, they get in trouble a lot. They screw up a lot. They never get held accountable because every time it says, oh, okay, well, AT&T or Verizon, whoever you are, you did something really bad here. You let everybody’s data go out to the public. Okay. But we’re also working with you and providing you with all of this information, we’ve got these government contracts to work with you so that you can have this surveillance data on all the bad guys. Do you want to lose access to the so-called bad guys? No. So just forget the data breach. Forget all the bad stuff. We’re your buddies.
Mike Papantonio: We’re the best. We’re your friends. Yeah.
