In this episode, host Jim Love kicks off his new profile series with a deep dive into the compelling career of Dr. Priscilla Johnson, an environmental advocate at the crossroads of technology and sustainability. Dr. Johnson discusses her work in building a data center in South Africa amidst a severe drought, her tenure as Director of Water Strategy at Microsoft, and her transition into cyber intelligence. She explains how her unique background and empathetic approach have informed her career decisions and advocacy for responsible resource management. The conversation also touches on the importance of situational awareness in cybersecurity, making this episode a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersections of environmental engineering, infrastructure, and cybersecurity.
00:00 Introduction to the Series
00:29 Meet Dr. Priscilla Johnson
00:54 Challenges of Building a Data Center in Africa
01:16 Dr. Johnson's Background and Role at Microsoft
02:38 Addressing the Water Crisis in South Africa
06:34 Innovative Solutions and Collaborations
19:12 Dr. Johnson's Journey into Environmental Engineering
24:47 Discovering Texas and Dow Chemical
25:15 Environmental Impact and Agent Orange
27:00 Challenges in Environmental Management
29:00 Maternity Leave and Data Issues
34:46 Transition to Cybersecurity
37:19 Cybersecurity Threats and Preparedness
48:26 Mentorship and Career Advice
53:20 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
One of the great things about hostinga program like this is that you get to
meet a lot of interesting people, andnormally I'm doing that in terms of an
event or a news story, but I thought,what if I just did a profile on the
people I thought were really interesting?
And it turns out I've got a couple ofthese to try out , I confess, I've been
(00:23):
working on this idea for almost a year,and I have two of these to try out with.
The first is Dr. Priscilla Johnson.
I met her hoping to talk to herabout infrastructure, particularly
drinking water and cybersecurity.
I met a fascinating person with anincredible career, so stayed till
(00:43):
the end and you can hear a few ofthe clips that I would've taken out
few minutes of for infrastructureor do what I did and listen to the
incredible stories she shared with me.
We pick up when she's talking aboutbuilding a data center in Africa
in the middle of a huge drought.
Now you'll probably know that datacenters take a lot of water and how
(01:04):
do you pull water, especially enoughto run a data center outta thin air.
That's where we started.
Two.
My name is Dr Priscilla JohnsonI could be introduced as someone
who is an earth advocate.
Who lives in the space between advancingtechnology and protecting the planet.
(01:29):
you've got a unique background andI want to talk to you about that.
You worked on a datacenter in South Africa.
\ You were the director of waterstrategy for Microsoft at that time.
You just finished a master's at PurdueUniversity in environmental engineering.
Do I have that right?
So not quite.
So I'll start with the education piece.
I have a master's and PhD fromPurdue, which I got some time ago.
(01:52):
what I'm finishing is a graduatecertificate in cyber intelligence
from James Madison University.
it focuses on the intelligencepiece of, the cyber war.
But you were at the time youwere, also a director of water
strategy at Microsoft, right?
Yes.
I was director of water strategy forMicrosoft a few years ago, I. Was
(02:17):
over all of their global data centers.
So it wasn't just South Africa.
That was a very small one.
But it had a very big impactbecause it was the first for
Microsoft on the continent and itlaunched their Africa hyperscale.
being an environmentalist, and dealingwith data centers They use a lot
of power, they use a lot of water.
(02:38):
And I was fascinated by this was you're,you were in the middle of a three year
drought, you're working for a companyand you have to open a data center.
How did you do that?
I'll start by saying that I'man empath and an intuitor.
I'm very strongly attuned to, thingsthat can be seen and can't be seen.
when I came on board, it was inOctober of 2017 and let's just say
(03:03):
the disaster quote unquote day zerothat whole term did not come on to
the world scene until January of 2018.
So that's just a few months later.
That was by the New York Times.
They had covered that story.
In doing so, it was a series of eventsthat got me to asking questions, which
(03:26):
is the thing I do most naturally.
I have a background incommunications from NYU.
That's my bachelor's degree.
So I'm used to asking a lot of questionsand being very curious about things.
So I started asking, of course, whenI came on board to Microsoft questions
about, where are these data centers?
Are they in populated areas?
(03:47):
Are they out in the middle of,rural America or rural anywhere?
And if so, why are they extractingso many natural resources and
what can we do to offset that?
So that was my framework.
And my reference.
And then when I heard about what wasgoing on in South Africa, the things
that I heard were the following.
And how I heard them was also important.
(04:10):
So I had a colleague at the timeat Microsoft who came by my office.
I'll never forget.
He stopped by and said, Hey, I'm on myway to South Africa as an Aspen fellow.
So it wasn't in his capacity.
As working on the data centers,he said, is there anything you
want me to find out from them?
Since I'm going thereand I was like, Sure.
I said, just, let me know.
(04:31):
What is it that they need?
What is it that they are working on thatthey are having stumbling blocks on?
Because that's a natural questionto ask if you're a director at
a place, a place like Microsoft.
So he comes back and it'sprobably about two weeks later.
And he sits in my office again and says,you'll never guess what's going on.
I said, what's happening.
(04:53):
He says, there's chaos.
He said there's no water.
And I said, what do you mean?
There's no water.
He says they're in the middle of a youdon't know if you're in the middle of a
drought, but they said, there's a droughtgoing on and people are really suffering.
They're quitting their jobs.
They're having to stand in line for water.
They're trucking water in as faras they knew from farmers and
(05:15):
the Western part of the Cape.
And I said, really?
And then I said there's a datacenter that they're building there.
I said, this doesn't,this is not adding up.
Why are we?
Yeah.
And you don't need a degree incommunications to know that you're
going to get some bad press atthis point, it's wasn't, I really
wasn't thinking about the press.
(05:36):
I was thinking about what decisions werebeing made at the time, because I do
know that with depending upon, who is.
Um, people can use money to getthings done and not get things
done in the most responsible way.
And it was my charge at that time.
(05:56):
So there was a responsibilitythat I had to make sure that
things were mobilized to address.
What was this pending drought?
And so that's when Iswitched on the light.
Figured really believe my brainand literally for everyone else
and started mobilizing this teamthat was going to be addressing it.
(06:17):
And what complicated it was that thedata center was under construction and
it had a lot of delays at the time.
And it was sold out andcustomers were waiting.
And the question was whatam I going to do about it?
And what'd you do?
So what I did was since I'm asystems thinker and a person who is
(06:40):
I guess you could say, I, I have atendency to really think empathically
about people and their plight.
I said, you know what?
And people say this all the timeabout companies like Microsoft.
We have an embarrassment of riches.
After we solve the problem in the fourwalls of our data center, what are
(07:00):
we going to do about helping people?
And to my, not really surprised, butamazement, Microsoft has an entire
arm called Microsoft Philanthropy.
And I literally scoured the campus.
I ran around Redmond's campus.
I was like, And for those who don'tknow where Redmond is, that's just
(07:22):
outside of Seattle, across thebridge 520 across Lake Washington.
And I was literallyknocking on people's doors.
They didn't know me.
I didn't know them.
If they had anything to do with MicrosoftPhilanthropy, I was, basically chasing
them down, asking them questions.
How do we help?
How does this work?
I was talking to a very helpfulperson from Disaster Response.
(07:46):
Microsoft has this whole Disaster Responseunit that anywhere in the world that
there's a disaster that you hear about,hurricanes, earthquakes, or otherwise
they send teams in right after or theymobilize them ahead of time to make
sure that their IT infrastructure Isresilient and is back up and running
and between the 30 person team thatI had mobilized for the engineering
(08:11):
piece of what are we going to do?
And that came later, by the way, Iwanted to find out what is it that
we could do outside the four walls?
And so I reached out to my ownpersonal contacts who live in South
Africa, who are from there about what.
Agencies would be best to workwith in terms of capacity.
(08:35):
The people that could interact with acompany like Microsoft receive funds from
a company like Microsoft to assist themto build more resilient infrastructure.
So it we landed on the Western CapeHealth Services and what the Western
Cape Health Services is it's a 52hospital entity in the Western Cape of
(08:56):
South Africa that serves about 7 millionpeople and they have the resources.
They have the facility managers there,et cetera, to help with managing what we
collectively came up with, what would bewhat would help them the most to withstand
a future drought that is a shortly coming.
And that was the installation ofsmart water meters and the smart water
(09:21):
meters came along with a a backboneof a technology built by I trine.
And they are 1 of the leading companiesthat make utility meters in general
they wrapped around a software solutionto help them with leak detection and
also to train their facility managerson the alert response and how to use.
The software itself for them totrack any type of remedial action
(09:46):
that they would need to take forany leaks that they discovered.
That was, component was reallyimportant for me to put that in
place, the community response.
It was also really importantfor me to continue working over.
I think January 2018, all the wayuntil actually when the the actual data
center launched which was later in 2019.
(10:09):
What I wanted to make sure ofwas that we were not taking
drinking water from people.
In my opinion, data centers shouldnot be run on potable water.
I'll just put that out there.
But if they are.
If they are, there needs to be a veryresponsible reuse strategy in place.
(10:29):
And there's a lot of ways to get to that.
But Cape Town was a very specific problem.
It was a very specific problem.
There is a reservoir, and I'm going tohave to pause to make sure I say it I
believe it's called Fee Waters Clough.
And it was designed for twomillion people, but then
the entire Cape Town area.
And then the Cape Town area,the greater Cape Town area grew
(10:52):
to almost eight million people.
So here they were relying on this.
One of this main reservoir which, itcomprises almost 60 percent of the water
that they actually serve to the Cape Tonyit's, and then there's also other smaller
reservoirs, but all of those were dry andthen it was the main reservoir that was
(11:12):
going dry that they had to shut off Andthey declared they would shut off on April
the 12th, 2018, and that's because itwould have reached Deadpool and they would
just had to shut them, the pumps off.
And then again, desalinization,any other alternative.
I did not want to explore any of thealternatives that would take away
(11:36):
drinking water from people, period.
So fast forward to August of 2018.
Meanwhile, the data centeris still being built.
So we're still not online, butthere is a big problem because
there's a compliance issue at hand.
What the.
(11:58):
Western Cape government had said wasthat 45 percent reduction across the
board for commercial entities likeMicrosoft had to be put in place.
But what did that mean for Microsoft?
We had.
Not come online.
(12:19):
So 45 percent of what?
Of zero?
So there we have another conundrum.
So in August of 2018, August is amonth for Stockholm World Water Week
where all the folks around the worldgather to talk and think about water.
Very seriously.
I was approached because I guesspeople they know that you're coming
to the conference because it'sannounced and people knew I was coming.
(12:43):
I was coming from Microsoft directwater strategy, and there was
no other real equivalent in theother tech center tech companies.
And a lot of people wantedmy time, but there was this
1 group that stood out to me.
It was called the youngwater professionals group.
Y. W. P. And they approached me.
(13:03):
They found me somehow in theconference knew it was me.
They came up to me and said, DrJohnson, can we get some of your time?
Could you please come and look atsome of the young water professionals
and what they're displaying?
They had an event going onand I said, you know what?
My calendar is full, but I willabsolutely give you my time if I have,
(13:26):
breaking my schedule and sure enough.
I had a break in my schedule.
I found them and I said, Hey, I'm here.
I can't make your event, but,maybe I could talk to someone.
And then I told them, I said, listen,this is the problem I'm trying to
solve and it's very specific problem.
I don't know if you have anyone in yourportfolio of young water professionals,
(13:48):
but I sure would like to talk to someone.
And I explained the situationjust I'm talking now and.
They said, and then they paused andturned around and sure enough, there
was someone walking by at the sametime that I was asking that question
and she asked her to come over.
(14:09):
Her name is Beth and we started talking.
She said she had this solutionin place that basically just took
ambient air and converted it intowith through a fancy dehumidifier.
drinking water, or atleast potable water, right?
And water that you coulduse for various purposes.
And I said, wow, no, okay.
(14:29):
That sounds like somethingI'd like to explore.
Can it be used on a large scale?
That's really what wasmy biggest question.
How big can this be scaled up?
Sounds great at the bench level,but can you scale this up?
We need a lot of water.
And over the course of the next threenights, I was on the phone with them
(14:52):
working through that technology andknowing that, there's a technical review
process that we have back at Microsoftthat I had gone through a couple of
times at that point more than a couple.
And I was able to give them a guidelineon this is what we're looking for.
And so the questions that I was askingthem allowed them to either beef up
(15:15):
their presentation or make more of adirected play at, providing more data,
whether it was energy or maintenance.
anything like that had todo with operating costs.
But most importantly ondelivering the result that we
needed, which was the water.
And how can you predict how muchwater you're going to actually
(15:36):
get from a device like that?
And so they went through thecalculations of how that happens.
It really has to do with humidity, right?
I said, okay at the end of thosethree nights, I said, you know what?
I'm going to take this back to Redmond.
I'm going to present it to myteam and we will go from there.
But I think this is in really good shape.
Now this was a a Kenyan based company.
(15:57):
It was a startup owned bythree women called magic water.
And They were
very responsive to any ofthe questions that I had.
Um, any changes that needed to bemade in terms of what to present
the CTO was just fantastic.
(16:19):
And when I say fantastic, I mean theyhad the sense of urgency that I had
that, because this was weighing onme and I really came there that week
to solve that problem because I knewthat these, this was the world's best
showing up in Stockholm, once a year.
And we took within four months, we wereable to take the construction and the
(16:45):
technology and integrated into thatdata center so that we were off grid.
We're the first that I know of off griddata center in the world for water.
And then the other questionbecame what about energy?
Because it does require moreenergy than was planned for.
So we.
(17:05):
Essentially planned.
To have a distributedgeneration their solar on site.
To offset that.
So those plans were put in place.
It wasn't something that we could puton the table right away just because we
were just trying to get the data centeropen and we had a phenomenal opening.
(17:26):
It was.
It was nothing like Ithought I would, experience.
We had the former premier ofthe Western Cape come to our
ribbon cutting, Helen Zillah.
And she was amazed.
She was very grateful and thankful that inthe time of one of the worst droughts that
South Africa had experienced over thiscourse of what had been then three years
(17:48):
no water, And we were able to deliverthe first hyperscale data center on the
continent in her territory, and it did nottake drinking water from the residents.
And so that's what I mean by my workbeing the nexus between advancing
(18:11):
technology and respecting the limits.
of what we have in theenvironment or what we don't have.
There's a way to do things that aren'tnecessarily the most expensive way.
There's a way to do things that aren'tnecessarily the most elaborate things.
(18:31):
Simplicity is so beautiful.
If you look at da Vinci's drawings,they're just some of the most,
oddly simple things like, why didn'twe think of this kind of thing?
That's the kind of person that thatI always want it to be is, thinking
very simply taking the beauty andthe simplicity of engineering and
leveraging it for advancing technologyand protecting the environment.
(18:55):
Wow.
Yeah.
I've been teachingengineers for a long time.
There aren't, there was not an abundanceof high power women in engineering.
So what drew you into thisfield in the first place?
Oh boy.
I know now that I'm inexactly the right place.
(19:17):
I should be because.
And I want to say this out of a lot ofrespect for the industry that I thought
I was going to be in and that industry,if I told you at the beginning, I was, in
communications and why you had internshipsin the music industry and film.
And I didn't think that world was for me.
(19:41):
It was New York city.
And I told you I'm an empath, and Ijust said, this doesn't feel right.
I don't.
Want to be in this industryor anywhere near it.
So I left it and I hadsome soul searching to do.
This was my senior year.
At NYU and at the time was one of the mostexpensive schools in the country probably
(20:03):
still is and, God bless my parents, theythey stuck with me the whole time and my
sister was at Columbia at the same time.
So for me to come out and say, Iwant to change my major, the way
that I decided on it was 1st, Isaid, okay, this isn't for me.
And then the 2nd thingthat I decided to do was.
(20:26):
Do what I do best,which is research stuff.
And this is back when wehad the card catalog system
and yeah, I remember.
And it was back when we hadthat and I queued up, I'll never
forget outside of folks library.
That's NYU's main libraryright in Washington square.
(20:47):
And I would be out there before it opened.
It was either six or seven in themorning that open Or I get camera,
but it was really early in the morningand I lived on the Upper East Side.
So I had to jump on the trainand go all the way down to NYU.
And I have my backpackand I have questions.
So I showed up thinking to myself,I've got to find something that will
(21:09):
get me out of bed every single day.
Now, I had a little kernel in myhead because I had taken this class
called Limits of the Earth taught byJoseph Mellet in the Brown building.
I will never forget.
I will never forget him.
I will never forget the building.
I'll never forget the class.
And we read somethingcalled State of the World.
(21:32):
And state of the world is apublication that comes out.
I think it still comes out every yearand it talks about, the state of our
planet from an environmental perspective.
And I was aghast.
I could not believe that thesethings were happening to our planet.
Like how could, how arewe living our lives?
Nothing's going on.
Or so I thought, I wasyoung and it shocked me.
(21:56):
But then at the same time, thatwas just one class I was taking.
There were all of these otherclasses I was finishing, but that
was in my mind as I went into Bobstlibrary and started digging through
the card catalog and starting toreally question where should I land?
So I decided.
The environment gets meout of bed every day.
(22:19):
That's, that was thequestion that I asked myself.
And as a matter of fact, when Imentor people, I ask them that
question, do you know what willget you out of bed every day?
So that's number one, number two.
What about the environment?
And I said if I want to do highereducation, I need to get the
highest degree, which is a PhD.
So that was settled.
I was like, okay, environment, PhD, okay.
(22:41):
Science versus engineering, environmentalscience versus environmental engineering.
I think I could do more on theengineering side because you decide
on the design of systems and howthey directly impact the planet.
So I said, I chose a PhD inenvironmental engineering, and
then this was the best part.
(23:03):
I started writing letters, yes, writingletters to professors around the country
who were at the top universities thathad environmental engineering programs.
And I will never forget the response thatI had gotten, but my favorite response,
First of all, it was very positivefrom those who answered me, but Dr.
(23:26):
Leonardo Ortolano, andI will say his name.
I've never met him.
He was at Stanford at the time.
He met, he mailed me a letter back.
I still have this letter.
And he said to me, here's what you do.
If you want to make thistransition, you take this class.
I already had a background in higherscience and math because I went to
(23:49):
a science and math tech high school.
I placed out of all thescience and math classes.
So I didn't really have to take anythingin undergraduate, but I still did.
And he said, you take theseclasses, put them on your
transcript, and then you just apply.
And you tell them your story, and I did.
(24:11):
Wow.
And you've come out of this engineeringdegree, you've worked at Microsoft, you've
done, I think, some incredible stuff.
What happened after that?
What, where'd you go after that?
So after the degree?
Yeah.
Or after Microsoft?
Oh, after both.
Okay.
So after the degree I wentto a very improbable place.
(24:33):
I went to Texas, which I ended up loving.
I, remember now I was, I considermyself a New Yorker and I ended up
going to a place where New Yorkershave an impression of Texas.
And When I got there, I foundthe most incredible people.
I love Texans and I love Texas.
(24:56):
My experience there is very positive.
And I ended up working forDow Chemical and Dow Chemical
is known for a lot of things.
They're known as the number onemaker of plastics in the world.
They are known for purchasing unioncarbide after Bhopal after that incident.
They are known for
(25:17):
impacting American history in a waythat others don't really know and
think, and they were commissionedat least two times in a major way by
the U. S. government to participatein war time activities, including
manufacturing aluminum for planes.
(25:38):
And they were also, and they hadtransformed this entire plant in
Freeport, Texas to do that and theirheadquarters that started in 1897
they had built in Midland, Michigan,
they manufactured Agent Orange there.
(26:02):
So this, I remember yeah.
So the Agent Orange that was manufacturedthere amongst a whole other host
of chemicals and it's byproducts.
Decades later in the former persistentorganic pollutants are still there.
It's 40 miles of river.
The plant is located directlyon the Tittabawassee River.
(26:24):
And if you look at a map, it's a V shape.
So the Tittabawassee River flows fromnorth to south, and then there's a,
Conjunction, it's like a V at thebottom and then it turns up going
from south to north into the SaginawRiver, which goes into the Saginaw Bay.
Since 1897, pre EPA, pre 1971, 72, therewere no environmental controls in place.
(26:51):
Along the river, there wasa lot of thermal pollution.
You can imagine it's just, theentire environment was stripped
and then the EPA comes along.
And then decades later, thereare now cancers and neurological
diseases and fish advisories.
(27:11):
And, people are starting to discoverin and through particular public health
consultation that was ordered andconducted that there were some problems.
There were some contamination problemsthat needed to be investigated.
They needed to be ultimately remediated.
So after my stint in Freeport,which lasted two years and I was
(27:33):
there just learning the ropes.
I was on the environmentalsustainable development team.
Of course, why, where else would I be?
I helped, Developed their at the time,their 2015, sustainability goals and, and
just learned about the industry itself.
Did a lot of project managementthere designing like a freshwater
recycle system for the entire plant.
(27:54):
And then moved up to Midland andthat is where I learned about myself.
And I say that because.
I was still very open eyed and naive,to really what people's intentions
(28:16):
were because, I'm an engineerand I take things at face value.
While I'm an intuitor and empath,I don't, think that people
are intentionally doing harm,
but I found out differently.
And I want to say I met some amazingpeople at Dow Chemical and some
(28:39):
of whom I'm still in contact with.
So not to cast any dispersions but the
experience that I had there was very rich.
It was a super learning experience,but it became something that I never
thought I would be in the middle of.
(29:00):
So I went on maternity leave and Iwas, just doing my job and kind of.
Letting everybody know asa project manager there.
I was part of this what's calledthe Michigan dioxin initiative.
It was to address the legacycontamination that was there.
I was brought up as a projectmanager brought up from Freeport.
That is and I was assigned tothis kind of an elite team.
(29:21):
It was only five people onthe team five core people.
And we were there to address this issue,that dioxins, the some of the most.
Hazardous compounds.
Or where they are presentin the environment.
T. C. D. 2378 T. C. D. And therewere other contaminants that the
(29:43):
mission department of environmentalquality as it was called at the time.
It's called Eagle.
Now they wanted to knowwhat other contaminants were
present in the environment.
We're in the environment.
So this is part of all part of my job.
I started as a G. I. S. Expert thereand just maybe it's really just kept
up with all the mapping where all thecontamination was when we're doing
a sampling where the hot spots were,making sure these things were reported
(30:07):
out in these quarterly reports thathad to go into the region five EPA.
Yeah.
And at the time, it was pretty contentiousbecause there were lawsuits and there were
multiple lawsuits and then there was apending class action lawsuit for Dow to
clean up everything that was there andand I just sat right in the middle of it.
I was.
(30:27):
They're just doing my job.
And then I went on maternity leave andI came back and the very first phone
call I got back when I was at my deskwas from a it was from a data validator.
Who was an expert in all the EPAmethodologies to actually even
detect some of the chemicalsthat we've been talking about.
(30:50):
And so I had a very high level ofconfidence in what they were doing.
They work for federal government,their entire organization had
government contracts to do this.
And she said, and my nameat the time was was Denny.
And she said, dr. Denny,they won't give me the data.
So what do you mean theywon't give you the data?
And she said.
I can't get the data.
(31:11):
And I said, what do you mean?
And she said, they won't let me have it.
I said, but I already, beforeI went to return, I told
everybody what they had to do.
You need to get the data to herand make sure that it's validated
so we can turn it into the EPA
and so I ended up saying, okaylet me find out what's going on.
(31:33):
I hung the phone up.
And mind you, this is my first call backfrom maternity leave after six weeks.
And I asked my manager and mymanager said, stay out of it.
And I was completely confused becausejust six weeks ago I had this job,
(31:56):
but now I have to stay out of my shop.
I just, nobody was explainingto me what was going on.
But what I also found out was thatthey thought I was coming back after
three months and not six weeks.
So I probed a little bit further.
I called her back on the datavalidator and I said, what's happening?
And she says the laboratory, noneof their machines are calibrated.
(32:18):
There's nothing up to datein terms of their and I'm
getting really technical here.
They're NCLs.
There's a there's an NCL study thathas to be done for all the equipment.
It's called Maxwell controllablelimits for The machines that actually
detect these contaminants, and youtechnically cannot turn in data
that are, analyzed on machines thatare not in compliance with this.
(32:43):
And I was finding outall of these things, and
I said, okay my managersaid to stay out of it.
I was finding out that the datawere being handled improperly, and
these are thousands of samples.
These aren't just, a couple of samplesand they were, They had to go before the
federal government, and not only that,they were and potentially going to be
(33:09):
used in legal action and litigation.
We had a responsibility to makesure that those data were right.
I did and so after having discoveredthat my manager said stay out
of it, and then discovering morediscrepancies, I contacted his manager.
Because that's what you do, right?
(33:29):
So I went to him and I said,this is what's going on.
I said, we've got to,we need to address this.
Why can't we just, let's do the correctthing here, and that's when my hell began.
Wow.
So you wanted to know what I didafter, after school and after and
(33:52):
I still have not changed as a person andas a professional and how I would respond.
Yeah, I can appreciate that.
But I think, there's a reason whyperfectly, I wouldn't say people
that we would normally assumehave a strong moral compass.
(34:13):
Seem to be able to lose that or forgetabout it in a corporate setting.
I think that, I think that's thekindest way to say it is, and
they can be very good people.
They could be pillars of theircommunity, but are somehow check
that out when they get to work.
And at times people confront that and
(34:34):
it's tough in terms of your careerand where you go, but you've
obviously been Survived all thisdone well, and you're now moving
into cybersecurity from all of this.
Yes.
I just, it I want to back up just andask you a little bit, but before we get
to the cybersecurity, you've, you did alot in what I'd call civil engineering.
(34:56):
And, I think that not what I'd callcivil, I think what everybody would
call civil engineering, but the, soyou've done a lot there and how do you
bridge from there to cybersecurity?
It
did not happen overnight, thiskind of revelation, there's key
moments in your life when thingshappen and you're called, right?
(35:21):
Or something calls you want to put it.
And I was on my treadmill.
I'll never forget this.
And I was watching a documentaryand the documentary was on white
nationalists here in the United States.
And, I grew up with my share ofthat, growing up in the South and the
confederate flags and all the hate andso it was part of, my growing up and
(35:50):
then I was hearing about how thesewhite nationalists were organizing
to poison our water systems.
Thanks.
Thanks.
And I was like, wait a minute,you do enough damage and now you
want to poison our water systems.
Come on.
So the flags, you got the torches,do to take the water to, so I was
(36:11):
absolutely incensed, I'm incensed abouta lot of things, um, that aren't right.
But this just took the cake.
Black in the United States is a challenge.
Being a black professional is a challenge.
But my calling, it serves everyone,including those white nationalists.
(36:36):
If they want clean drinking water,okay I'll show up at a waste, a water
treatment plant or a wastewater treatmentplant if it's a reclamation district.
I'll be involved in water efficiencyefforts, energy efficiency efforts
like I was at PG& E in California.
I will do what I can for the environmentbecause I know that's why I'm here.
(36:57):
But that just galled me.
And so I started thinking and it takesa little time sometimes for me to
synthesize everything because I'm usuallybusy and neat, dive deep and whatever
I'm working on at the time and I said,okay, I'm looking back over this career.
I've been in chemicals and the chemicalindustry, major challenge there.
(37:19):
I've been in water and wastewater,I've been in energy, the point
data centers, all these criticalinfrastructure pieces that everyone is
telling particularly the FBI here inthe United States are telling everyone
that, these systems are under attack.
(37:42):
What can I do that makes sensefor this next step in my career?
And then I was introduced, and I'm sograteful, I was introduced to one of the
leading experts in DDoS and distributeddenial of service attacks Dr. Edna Reed
she was an adjunct professor at JamesMadison University until recently, and
(38:05):
my professor I was introduced to her byone of her mentors from the FBI, and he
was our nation's first counterterrorismchief at the FBI following 9 11.
And he's a very good friend ofmine, and I trust him, and he said,
you really need to talk to her.
And she told me about her program.
(38:26):
It's a graduate certificatein cyber intelligence.
And I started thinking I said I don'tnecessarily want to be in cyber security.
Have a background in IT from mygraduate school years, but I didn't
necessarily want to do that type ofwork, but the intelligence piece.
It's fascinating, because you're talkingabout using analytical methods to find
(38:50):
out the who, the when, and the tactics,the techniques, the procedures of these
cyber threat actors, and how they would,compromise our critical infrastructure.
So that.
Is how I got into this space and overthe course of the last 2 to 3 years in
(39:11):
talking with her, I entered the programand now I'm about to finish the program
in December and it has enlightened me.
in ways that I'm, I feel more empoweredto be of assistance in that fight.
Now, yes, it goes back to me watchingthat documentary with a white nationalist,
(39:34):
but I learned then, it's beyond that.
It's the nation state actors that areusing cyber in a ways That can cripple us,
just from delivering hospital services,making sure patients are getting the
right food all the way down to that.
And then all the way to,just this mass scale chaos.
(39:55):
And that's really, I think, whatmost countries, most cyber threat
actors want to impose is thatchaos and that fear, apart from if
they're in the ransomware business.
They want money.
Yeah.
And I think you're absolutely right.
I don't hear enough of it on fromregular media sources, but, and I'm
(40:17):
not I'm just a person who studies data.
The potential for terrorism orwhatever you want to call it.
From that is within North Americaor the U S and Canada is, I think
is totally underestimated thenation states that are attacking us.
I get a lot of pressand we do a lot of that.
(40:39):
But I think the third thing that istotally under underestimated is the degree
to which our civil infrastructure Firstof all can't hold up to attacks, whether
they be from internal or external threats.
The second thing is, I don'tthink anybody realizes how much
of our civil infrastructure hasprobably already been compromised.
(41:00):
Did you, in your studies, youmust've been talking to some of
the sharper people in the industry.
Is that perception held by peoplewho are working in cybersecurity
or at least teaching it these days?
Do people realize the depthto which we are vulnerable?
It's a great question.
For one my, my mentor, my professordefinitely does she's former FBI, CIA.
(41:20):
So she has a very healthyappreciation for that.
But in general I don't know if peoplehaven't been really impacted by
something, then the threat is just oneof the other threats out there, right?
Bye.
The potential for getting in your car andhaving an accident and that type of thing.
(41:41):
It's goes in with that.
But this is different, though,and I think it's a threat and a
fear that people have not faced.
They don't know what it's like atleast here in, in the United States
and other places around the world.
Absolutely.
They know what it's like tohave their infrastructure in a
day be destroyed and decimated.
(42:06):
We have so much privilegeof not having to know that.
Depending upon who you ask and where youask them, and where they lived and what
their experiences have been I don't thinkthere's going to be that sense of alarm.
But, I think the, what a lot of theagencies I'm seeing are trying to do and
(42:28):
they've done for quite some time, but fordifferent reasons, is to prepare people.
Thank you.
For when it happens, and I know livingin the Bay Area, I've lived there for 12
years in San Francisco Bay, the threatof earthquakes is very real, and I became
part of an emergency response team atwork on my job site, and learned how to
prepare for an earthquake at any moment,always have something in your car, always
(42:52):
have something at your house, always havesomething in your office, and the magic
number was at the time when I left, three.
Weeks have something for threeweeks because the first responders
will not be able to get to you.
(43:12):
There's not enough of them.
So the preparedness piece though,is there's definitely a what you
would consider some people call them,fringe, the doomsday preppers or
however, you want to characterize them.
But these folks, they havethe right mentality because
you do want to be prepared.
(43:33):
For when something happens and the firstresponders can't get to you, but, and
it's ironic, you need to have water,you need to have plenty of water.
I think it's, it is different.
I'm old enough to remember Y2K and friendsof mine buying generators and they're
stocking up on food and all that stuff.
(43:54):
And I said, don't be ridiculous.
The We are, we, I lived in Toronto,Canada at the time, where major city,
there was no way that city could dowithout power for more than two days.
Somebody will do something about it.
And I knew people in workingin infrastructure and
hydro and things like that.
(44:15):
And I knew that people wereactively working on this.
I had a great faith intheir ability to handle.
That even the whole Easternseaboard went down in my lifetime.
People came back up, we recovered.
I'm not a survivalist by any stretch ofthe imagination, but I have a generator
and food because I, I don't believe now.
(44:39):
I believe that the infrastructure wehave is so old and so brittle that
it could be taken out by anybody.
And I think we only have tolook at what people, what
hackers have done to healthcare.
To see how quickly they can close downan essential part of our infrastructure.
And I think that's, I don't think I'mno, I wouldn't, I would have dismissed
(44:59):
survivalists at any one point, butI'm now convinced that there will
be a major infrastructure failing.
Yes, I agree.
As a matter of fact, I'm preparingfor a workshop I'm giving on Monday.
It's a simulated cyber attack on theHoover Dam, which, as supplies energy
and water through Lake Mead backto the greater Clark County area.
(45:23):
And part of what I'm doing isthese are water researchers.
That I'm talking to some ofthem are practitioners, but
they're mostly researchers.
And it's about situationalawareness, really.
So am I going there to teachthem cyber security principles?
Absolutely.
Yes, they're going to learn some of that.
Am I going there to teach themabout some of the tactics that
(45:45):
are used by cyber threat actors?
Absolutely.
They're going to learn some of that.
But essentially, what they'regoing to learn is the landscape
and the absolute breath of thepersistence of these types of attacks
on our systems on a daily basis.
And then, if you go into mostof the circles, everyone talks
(46:07):
about living off the land and howthey're already in our systems.
These the adversaries aresitting in our systems now just
waiting for an opportunity time.
And that is.
If we already know that,then how can we expel them?
How can we close the doors?
but a lot of times we justwant to see what they're doing.
(46:28):
So there's that piece, right?
But the situational awareness isimportant because there are still some,
there's still that human component.
That is feeding intowhy they're successful.
There are business email compromises.
There are social engineeringtechniques to be able to
(46:48):
extract information from people.
Just look at the MGM casino heist,I call it the 70 year old makes a
phone call and says, Hey, I need toreset my password, pretending as if,
And so it's these very basic thingsthat we need to start thinking about,
guarding our own PII, which is allthe radio personal identifiable
(47:10):
information is already out there.
Our social security numbers.
We just heard, I, I think everyone'sprofile is on some dark web
website somewhere at some point.
So now it's just really us toup to us to be proactive, but.
Also be vigilant about thetechniques that are being used.
One of the reasons I mostwanted to have this conversation
(47:32):
and it's been fascinating.
I, I am so pleased to have met you.
It's been fascinating, but it's.
I think one of the things westruggle with is getting good
people into cyber security.
And I think a look at your career and whatyou've done and I'm going to say unlikely.
I will totally respect the challengesof growing up black in North, in the
(47:54):
U S and what that does being a womanin this area, being someone who's got
a moral compass that, that needs, thatyou need to work with all of those.
Could be barriers to your progress.
You've obviously smashedthrough all of them.
If you were speaking to otherpeople, be they women or be there
anybody else who was coming in,what would you say to them about
(48:19):
how they might approach acareer in cybersecurity from
what you've seen so far?
Thank you for that questionbecause I mentor a lot of people.
So you're giving me a platformto talk to even more people.
Mentor all genders, all ethnicities,all nationalities people contact
me from around the world askingfor advice and I give them my time.
(48:43):
And usually the first interaction, becauseI have many interactions with them,
over the course of their from when theycontact me, the first conversation I have
with them is really a philosophical one.
And it has to do with knowing yourself.
(49:03):
And again, back to thosequestions, what's going to get
you out of bed every single day.
Sometimes people already know whatthey want to do, but they don't
know how to go about and do it.
So that question becomes, what doyou want to develop as a habit?
(49:28):
That you do every day, whether it's Iget up and I am not just because I'm
talking to you, Joe, but I get up and Ilisten to cyber security today, every day.
That's what I do.
I listened to cyber security today.
I listened to other podcasts, butthis is actually my favorite podcast.
If you want to educate yourself on.
(49:49):
Something new do that.
And that's what I did.
I found cyber security todayout there on Apple podcast.
Okay.
And I started listening and it was Soeducational and natural the way that the,
folks were talking, it was so natural.
Nobody was selling anything.
It wasn't some big marketing push.
(50:11):
It wasn't anything like that.
It was simple.
It was short.
It was to the point.
And so educating yourself andfinding a vehicle that will give you
whatever you need, wherever you are.
So that's the other key pointis not only knowing what will
get you out of bed every day is.
(50:34):
Finding something that's accessible toyou that will inform your decisions.
And then I would say the thirdthing is just finding the people
who will help you reach out.
LinkedIn is an amazing tool.
LinkedIn is probably the best tool inmy opinion, going to conferences and
finding out people who are interestedin you, but also ask questions
(50:57):
when you're at these conferences.
And take away, the fear of someone willthink I'm stupid if I ask this question.
No, ask the question because thatopens you up to, first of all,
getting your question answered.
And second of all, having someoneelse be interested in you.
(51:19):
So with that, cybersecurity is.
It's very much a profession that wantsyou, if you're listening they really
want you as a person to come in andgrapple with some of these things.
When I was putting this conferencetogether, I was just almost overwhelmed
(51:41):
by how complicated this feat is thatwe have every single day, thousands,
if not millions of attacks on systems.
And it's not because they're tryingto do something good, it's their
adversaries trying to do something thatis harmful, and then realizing that.
(52:03):
The internet was never reallybuilt with security in mind.
And I think that's what takes you back.
And there's a fantastic articlecalled The Net of Insecurity from
2015, May 30th, 2015 by CraigTimber from the Washington Post.
How do I know that, thatauthor and the date so well?
Because yesterday I spent a fewhours trying to find that article.
(52:27):
And It is such a good article that talksabout the beginnings of the Internet
as we are experiencing it today andwhy cybersecurity is so necessary
because it was not built to be secure.
Now, I say that with the caveat that.
There are some people like Vint Cerfwho did want to have security embedded
(52:51):
and encryption embedded in the internetin the way that he thought would be
more secure, but he was voted down.
And I'll just leave it at that.
You can read the article.
So that's what I would say to peoplewho are interested in cybersecurity.
We want you I'm breakinginto the profession.
I'm on the cyber intelligence side.
(53:12):
I'm not doing the IT part,although I understand it.
Come there's plenty of work to do.
And on that happy note, thank youso much for this conversation.
This has been fabulous.
And that's our show.
This has been what I hope isthe first in my profile series,
(53:35):
discussions with fascinating people.
I have another of these that I'mreleasing next Tuesday on hashtag
trending my daily tech news show.
Check it out if you're interestedand let me know if you want to
hear or see more stories like this.
You could reach me ateditorial@technewsday.ca.
That's editorial@technewsday.ca.
(53:59):
Or if you're watching this on YouTube,just drop me a note in the comments.
I'm your host, Jim.
Love.
Thanks for listening.
I.
One of the great things about hostinga program like this is that you get to
meet a lot of interesting people, andnormally I'm doing that in terms of an
event or a news story, but I thought,what if I just did a profile on the
people I thought were really interesting?
And it turns out I've got a couple ofthese to try out , I confess, I've been
(00:23):
working on this idea for almost a year,and I have two of these to try out with.
The first is Dr. Priscilla Johnson.
I met her hoping to talk to herabout infrastructure, particularly
drinking water and cybersecurity.
I met a fascinating person with anincredible career, so stayed till
(00:43):
the end and you can hear a few ofthe clips that I would've taken out
few minutes of for infrastructureor do what I did and listen to the
incredible stories she shared with me.
We pick up when she's talking aboutbuilding a data center in Africa
in the middle of a huge drought.
Now you'll probably know that datacenters take a lot of water and how
(01:04):
do you pull water, especially enoughto run a data center outta thin air.
That's where we started.
Two.
My name is Dr Priscilla JohnsonI could be introduced as someone
who is an earth advocate.
Who lives in the space between advancingtechnology and protecting the planet.
(01:29):
you've got a unique background andI want to talk to you about that.
You worked on a datacenter in South Africa.
\ You were the director of waterstrategy for Microsoft at that time.
You just finished a master's at PurdueUniversity in environmental engineering.
Do I have that right?
So not quite.
So I'll start with the education piece.
I have a master's and PhD fromPurdue, which I got some time ago.
(01:52):
what I'm finishing is a graduatecertificate in cyber intelligence
from James Madison University.
it focuses on the intelligencepiece of, the cyber war.
But you were at the time youwere, also a director of water
strategy at Microsoft, right?
Yes.
I was director of water strategy forMicrosoft a few years ago, I. Was
(02:17):
over all of their global data centers.
So it wasn't just South Africa.
That was a very small one.
But it had a very big impactbecause it was the first for
Microsoft on the continent and itlaunched their Africa hyperscale.
being an environmentalist, and dealingwith data centers They use a lot
of power, they use a lot of water.
(02:38):
And I was fascinated by this was you're,you were in the middle of a three year
drought, you're working for a companyand you have to open a data center.
How did you do that?
I'll start by saying that I'man empath and an intuitor.
I'm very strongly attuned to, thingsthat can be seen and can't be seen.
when I came on board, it was inOctober of 2017 and let's just say
(03:03):
the disaster quote unquote day zerothat whole term did not come on to
the world scene until January of 2018.
So that's just a few months later.
That was by the New York Times.
They had covered that story.
In doing so, it was a series of eventsthat got me to asking questions, which
(03:26):
is the thing I do most naturally.
I have a background incommunications from NYU.
That's my bachelor's degree.
So I'm used to asking a lot of questionsand being very curious about things.
So I started asking, of course, whenI came on board to Microsoft questions
about, where are these data centers?
Are they in populated areas?
(03:47):
Are they out in the middle of,rural America or rural anywhere?
And if so, why are they extractingso many natural resources and
what can we do to offset that?
So that was my framework.
And my reference.
And then when I heard about what wasgoing on in South Africa, the things
that I heard were the following.
And how I heard them was also important.
(04:10):
So I had a colleague at the timeat Microsoft who came by my office.
I'll never forget.
He stopped by and said, Hey, I'm on myway to South Africa as an Aspen fellow.
So it wasn't in his capacity.
As working on the data centers,he said, is there anything you
want me to find out from them?
Since I'm going thereand I was like, Sure.
I said, just, let me know.
(04:31):
What is it that they need?
What is it that they are working on thatthey are having stumbling blocks on?
Because that's a natural questionto ask if you're a director at
a place, a place like Microsoft.
So he comes back and it'sprobably about two weeks later.
And he sits in my office again and says,you'll never guess what's going on.
I said, what's happening.
(04:53):
He says, there's chaos.
He said there's no water.
And I said, what do you mean?
There's no water.
He says they're in the middle of a youdon't know if you're in the middle of a
drought, but they said, there's a droughtgoing on and people are really suffering.
They're quitting their jobs.
They're having to stand in line for water.
They're trucking water in as faras they knew from farmers and
(05:15):
the Western part of the Cape.
And I said, really?
And then I said there's a datacenter that they're building there.
I said, this doesn't,this is not adding up.
Why are we?
Yeah.
And you don't need a degree incommunications to know that you're
going to get some bad press atthis point, it's wasn't, I really
wasn't thinking about the press.
(05:36):
I was thinking about what decisions werebeing made at the time, because I do
know that with depending upon, who is.
Um, people can use money to getthings done and not get things
done in the most responsible way.
And it was my charge at that time.
(05:56):
So there was a responsibilitythat I had to make sure that
things were mobilized to address.
What was this pending drought?
And so that's when Iswitched on the light.
Figured really believe my brainand literally for everyone else
and started mobilizing this teamthat was going to be addressing it.
(06:17):
And what complicated it was that thedata center was under construction and
it had a lot of delays at the time.
And it was sold out andcustomers were waiting.
And the question was whatam I going to do about it?
And what'd you do?
So what I did was since I'm asystems thinker and a person who is
(06:40):
I guess you could say, I, I have atendency to really think empathically
about people and their plight.
I said, you know what?
And people say this all the timeabout companies like Microsoft.
We have an embarrassment of riches.
After we solve the problem in the fourwalls of our data center, what are
(07:00):
we going to do about helping people?
And to my, not really surprised, butamazement, Microsoft has an entire
arm called Microsoft Philanthropy.
And I literally scoured the campus.
I ran around Redmond's campus.
I was like, And for those who don'tknow where Redmond is, that's just
(07:22):
outside of Seattle, across thebridge 520 across Lake Washington.
And I was literallyknocking on people's doors.
They didn't know me.
I didn't know them.
If they had anything to do with MicrosoftPhilanthropy, I was, basically chasing
them down, asking them questions.
How do we help?
How does this work?
I was talking to a very helpfulperson from Disaster Response.
(07:46):
Microsoft has this whole Disaster Responseunit that anywhere in the world that
there's a disaster that you hear about,hurricanes, earthquakes, or otherwise
they send teams in right after or theymobilize them ahead of time to make
sure that their IT infrastructure Isresilient and is back up and running
and between the 30 person team thatI had mobilized for the engineering
(08:11):
piece of what are we going to do?
And that came later, by the way, Iwanted to find out what is it that
we could do outside the four walls?
And so I reached out to my ownpersonal contacts who live in South
Africa, who are from there about what.
Agencies would be best to workwith in terms of capacity.
(08:35):
The people that could interact with acompany like Microsoft receive funds from
a company like Microsoft to assist themto build more resilient infrastructure.
So it we landed on the Western CapeHealth Services and what the Western
Cape Health Services is it's a 52hospital entity in the Western Cape of
(08:56):
South Africa that serves about 7 millionpeople and they have the resources.
They have the facility managers there,et cetera, to help with managing what we
collectively came up with, what would bewhat would help them the most to withstand
a future drought that is a shortly coming.
And that was the installation ofsmart water meters and the smart water
(09:21):
meters came along with a a backboneof a technology built by I trine.
And they are 1 of the leading companiesthat make utility meters in general
they wrapped around a software solutionto help them with leak detection and
also to train their facility managerson the alert response and how to use.
The software itself for them totrack any type of remedial action
(09:46):
that they would need to take forany leaks that they discovered.
That was, component was reallyimportant for me to put that in
place, the community response.
It was also really importantfor me to continue working over.
I think January 2018, all the wayuntil actually when the the actual data
center launched which was later in 2019.
(10:09):
What I wanted to make sure ofwas that we were not taking
drinking water from people.
In my opinion, data centers shouldnot be run on potable water.
I'll just put that out there.
But if they are.
If they are, there needs to be a veryresponsible reuse strategy in place.
(10:29):
And there's a lot of ways to get to that.
But Cape Town was a very specific problem.
It was a very specific problem.
There is a reservoir, and I'm going tohave to pause to make sure I say it I
believe it's called Fee Waters Clough.
And it was designed for twomillion people, but then
the entire Cape Town area.
And then the Cape Town area,the greater Cape Town area grew
(10:52):
to almost eight million people.
So here they were relying on this.
One of this main reservoir which, itcomprises almost 60 percent of the water
that they actually serve to the Cape Tonyit's, and then there's also other smaller
reservoirs, but all of those were dry andthen it was the main reservoir that was
(11:12):
going dry that they had to shut off Andthey declared they would shut off on April
the 12th, 2018, and that's because itwould have reached Deadpool and they would
just had to shut them, the pumps off.
And then again, desalinization,any other alternative.
I did not want to explore any of thealternatives that would take away
(11:36):
drinking water from people, period.
So fast forward to August of 2018.
Meanwhile, the data centeris still being built.
So we're still not online, butthere is a big problem because
there's a compliance issue at hand.
What the.
(11:58):
Western Cape government had said wasthat 45 percent reduction across the
board for commercial entities likeMicrosoft had to be put in place.
But what did that mean for Microsoft?
We had.
Not come online.
(12:19):
So 45 percent of what?
Of zero?
So there we have another conundrum.
So in August of 2018, August is amonth for Stockholm World Water Week
where all the folks around the worldgather to talk and think about water.
Very seriously.
I was approached because I guesspeople they know that you're coming
to the conference because it'sannounced and people knew I was coming.
(12:43):
I was coming from Microsoft directwater strategy, and there was
no other real equivalent in theother tech center tech companies.
And a lot of people wantedmy time, but there was this
1 group that stood out to me.
It was called the youngwater professionals group.
Y. W. P. And they approached me.
(13:03):
They found me somehow in theconference knew it was me.
They came up to me and said, DrJohnson, can we get some of your time?
Could you please come and look atsome of the young water professionals
and what they're displaying?
They had an event going onand I said, you know what?
My calendar is full, but I willabsolutely give you my time if I have,
(13:26):
breaking my schedule and sure enough.
I had a break in my schedule.
I found them and I said, Hey, I'm here.
I can't make your event, but,maybe I could talk to someone.
And then I told them, I said, listen,this is the problem I'm trying to
solve and it's very specific problem.
I don't know if you have anyone in yourportfolio of young water professionals,
(13:48):
but I sure would like to talk to someone.
And I explained the situationjust I'm talking now and.
They said, and then they paused andturned around and sure enough, there
was someone walking by at the sametime that I was asking that question
and she asked her to come over.
(14:09):
Her name is Beth and we started talking.
She said she had this solutionin place that basically just took
ambient air and converted it intowith through a fancy dehumidifier.
drinking water, or atleast potable water, right?
And water that you coulduse for various purposes.
And I said, wow, no, okay.
(14:29):
That sounds like somethingI'd like to explore.
Can it be used on a large scale?
That's really what wasmy biggest question.
How big can this be scaled up?
Sounds great at the bench level,but can you scale this up?
We need a lot of water.
And over the course of the next threenights, I was on the phone with them
(14:52):
working through that technology andknowing that, there's a technical review
process that we have back at Microsoftthat I had gone through a couple of
times at that point more than a couple.
And I was able to give them a guidelineon this is what we're looking for.
And so the questions that I was askingthem allowed them to either beef up
(15:15):
their presentation or make more of adirected play at, providing more data,
whether it was energy or maintenance.
anything like that had todo with operating costs.
But most importantly ondelivering the result that we
needed, which was the water.
And how can you predict how muchwater you're going to actually
(15:36):
get from a device like that?
And so they went through thecalculations of how that happens.
It really has to do with humidity, right?
I said, okay at the end of thosethree nights, I said, you know what?
I'm going to take this back to Redmond.
I'm going to present it to myteam and we will go from there.
But I think this is in really good shape.
Now this was a a Kenyan based company.
(15:57):
It was a startup owned bythree women called magic water.
And They were
very responsive to any ofthe questions that I had.
Um, any changes that needed to bemade in terms of what to present
the CTO was just fantastic.
(16:19):
And when I say fantastic, I mean theyhad the sense of urgency that I had
that, because this was weighing onme and I really came there that week
to solve that problem because I knewthat these, this was the world's best
showing up in Stockholm, once a year.
And we took within four months, we wereable to take the construction and the
(16:45):
technology and integrated into thatdata center so that we were off grid.
We're the first that I know of off griddata center in the world for water.
And then the other questionbecame what about energy?
Because it does require moreenergy than was planned for.
So we.
(17:05):
Essentially planned.
To have a distributedgeneration their solar on site.
To offset that.
So those plans were put in place.
It wasn't something that we could puton the table right away just because we
were just trying to get the data centeropen and we had a phenomenal opening.
(17:26):
It was.
It was nothing like Ithought I would, experience.
We had the former premier ofthe Western Cape come to our
ribbon cutting, Helen Zillah.
And she was amazed.
She was very grateful and thankful that inthe time of one of the worst droughts that
South Africa had experienced over thiscourse of what had been then three years
(17:48):
no water, And we were able to deliverthe first hyperscale data center on the
continent in her territory, and it did nottake drinking water from the residents.
And so that's what I mean by my workbeing the nexus between advancing
(18:11):
technology and respecting the limits.
of what we have in theenvironment or what we don't have.
There's a way to do things that aren'tnecessarily the most expensive way.
There's a way to do things that aren'tnecessarily the most elaborate things.
(18:31):
Simplicity is so beautiful.
If you look at da Vinci's drawings,they're just some of the most,
oddly simple things like, why didn'twe think of this kind of thing?
That's the kind of person that thatI always want it to be is, thinking
very simply taking the beauty andthe simplicity of engineering and
leveraging it for advancing technologyand protecting the environment.
(18:55):
Wow.
Yeah.
I've been teachingengineers for a long time.
There aren't, there was not an abundanceof high power women in engineering.
So what drew you into thisfield in the first place?
Oh boy.
I know now that I'm inexactly the right place.
(19:17):
I should be because.
And I want to say this out of a lot ofrespect for the industry that I thought
I was going to be in and that industry,if I told you at the beginning, I was, in
communications and why you had internshipsin the music industry and film.
And I didn't think that world was for me.
(19:41):
It was New York city.
And I told you I'm an empath, and Ijust said, this doesn't feel right.
I don't.
Want to be in this industryor anywhere near it.
So I left it and I hadsome soul searching to do.
This was my senior year.
At NYU and at the time was one of the mostexpensive schools in the country probably
(20:03):
still is and, God bless my parents, theythey stuck with me the whole time and my
sister was at Columbia at the same time.
So for me to come out and say, Iwant to change my major, the way
that I decided on it was 1st, Isaid, okay, this isn't for me.
And then the 2nd thingthat I decided to do was.
(20:26):
Do what I do best,which is research stuff.
And this is back when wehad the card catalog system
and yeah, I remember.
And it was back when we hadthat and I queued up, I'll never
forget outside of folks library.
That's NYU's main libraryright in Washington square.
(20:47):
And I would be out there before it opened.
It was either six or seven in themorning that open Or I get camera,
but it was really early in the morningand I lived on the Upper East Side.
So I had to jump on the trainand go all the way down to NYU.
And I have my backpackand I have questions.
So I showed up thinking to myself,I've got to find something that will
(21:09):
get me out of bed every single day.
Now, I had a little kernel in myhead because I had taken this class
called Limits of the Earth taught byJoseph Mellet in the Brown building.
I will never forget.
I will never forget him.
I will never forget the building.
I'll never forget the class.
And we read somethingcalled State of the World.
(21:32):
And state of the world is apublication that comes out.
I think it still comes out every yearand it talks about, the state of our
planet from an environmental perspective.
And I was aghast.
I could not believe that thesethings were happening to our planet.
Like how could, how arewe living our lives?
Nothing's going on.
Or so I thought, I wasyoung and it shocked me.
(21:56):
But then at the same time, thatwas just one class I was taking.
There were all of these otherclasses I was finishing, but that
was in my mind as I went into Bobstlibrary and started digging through
the card catalog and starting toreally question where should I land?
So I decided.
The environment gets meout of bed every day.
(22:19):
That's, that was thequestion that I asked myself.
And as a matter of fact, when Imentor people, I ask them that
question, do you know what willget you out of bed every day?
So that's number one, number two.
What about the environment?
And I said if I want to do highereducation, I need to get the
highest degree, which is a PhD.
So that was settled.
I was like, okay, environment, PhD, okay.
(22:41):
Science versus engineering, environmentalscience versus environmental engineering.
I think I could do more on theengineering side because you decide
on the design of systems and howthey directly impact the planet.
So I said, I chose a PhD inenvironmental engineering, and
then this was the best part.
(23:03):
I started writing letters, yes, writingletters to professors around the country
who were at the top universities thathad environmental engineering programs.
And I will never forget the response thatI had gotten, but my favorite response,
First of all, it was very positivefrom those who answered me, but Dr.
(23:26):
Leonardo Ortolano, andI will say his name.
I've never met him.
He was at Stanford at the time.
He met, he mailed me a letter back.
I still have this letter.
And he said to me, here's what you do.
If you want to make thistransition, you take this class.
I already had a background in higherscience and math because I went to
(23:49):
a science and math tech high school.
I placed out of all thescience and math classes.
So I didn't really have to take anythingin undergraduate, but I still did.
And he said, you take theseclasses, put them on your
transcript, and then you just apply.
And you tell them your story, and I did.
(24:11):
Wow.
And you've come out of this engineeringdegree, you've worked at Microsoft, you've
done, I think, some incredible stuff.
What happened after that?
What, where'd you go after that?
So after the degree?
Yeah.
Or after Microsoft?
Oh, after both.
Okay.
So after the degree I wentto a very improbable place.
(24:33):
I went to Texas, which I ended up loving.
I, remember now I was, I considermyself a New Yorker and I ended up
going to a place where New Yorkershave an impression of Texas.
And When I got there, I foundthe most incredible people.
I love Texans and I love Texas.
(24:56):
My experience there is very positive.
And I ended up working forDow Chemical and Dow Chemical
is known for a lot of things.
They're known as the number onemaker of plastics in the world.
They are known for purchasing unioncarbide after Bhopal after that incident.
They are known for
(25:17):
impacting American history in a waythat others don't really know and
think, and they were commissionedat least two times in a major way by
the U. S. government to participatein war time activities, including
manufacturing aluminum for planes.
(25:38):
And they were also, and they hadtransformed this entire plant in
Freeport, Texas to do that and theirheadquarters that started in 1897
they had built in Midland, Michigan,
they manufactured Agent Orange there.
(26:02):
So this, I remember yeah.
So the Agent Orange that was manufacturedthere amongst a whole other host
of chemicals and it's byproducts.
Decades later in the former persistentorganic pollutants are still there.
It's 40 miles of river.
The plant is located directlyon the Tittabawassee River.
(26:24):
And if you look at a map, it's a V shape.
So the Tittabawassee River flows fromnorth to south, and then there's a,
Conjunction, it's like a V at thebottom and then it turns up going
from south to north into the SaginawRiver, which goes into the Saginaw Bay.
Since 1897, pre EPA, pre 1971, 72, therewere no environmental controls in place.
(26:51):
Along the river, there wasa lot of thermal pollution.
You can imagine it's just, theentire environment was stripped
and then the EPA comes along.
And then decades later, thereare now cancers and neurological
diseases and fish advisories.
(27:11):
And, people are starting to discoverin and through particular public health
consultation that was ordered andconducted that there were some problems.
There were some contamination problemsthat needed to be investigated.
They needed to be ultimately remediated.
So after my stint in Freeport,which lasted two years and I was
(27:33):
there just learning the ropes.
I was on the environmentalsustainable development team.
Of course, why, where else would I be?
I helped, Developed their at the time,their 2015, sustainability goals and, and
just learned about the industry itself.
Did a lot of project managementthere designing like a freshwater
recycle system for the entire plant.
(27:54):
And then moved up to Midland andthat is where I learned about myself.
And I say that because.
I was still very open eyed and naive,to really what people's intentions
(28:16):
were because, I'm an engineerand I take things at face value.
While I'm an intuitor and empath,I don't, think that people
are intentionally doing harm,
but I found out differently.
And I want to say I met some amazingpeople at Dow Chemical and some
(28:39):
of whom I'm still in contact with.
So not to cast any dispersions but the
experience that I had there was very rich.
It was a super learning experience,but it became something that I never
thought I would be in the middle of.
(29:00):
So I went on maternity leave and Iwas, just doing my job and kind of.
Letting everybody know asa project manager there.
I was part of this what's calledthe Michigan dioxin initiative.
It was to address the legacycontamination that was there.
I was brought up as a projectmanager brought up from Freeport.
That is and I was assigned tothis kind of an elite team.
(29:21):
It was only five people onthe team five core people.
And we were there to address this issue,that dioxins, the some of the most.
Hazardous compounds.
Or where they are presentin the environment.
T. C. D. 2378 T. C. D. And therewere other contaminants that the
(29:43):
mission department of environmentalquality as it was called at the time.
It's called Eagle.
Now they wanted to knowwhat other contaminants were
present in the environment.
We're in the environment.
So this is part of all part of my job.
I started as a G. I. S. Expert thereand just maybe it's really just kept
up with all the mapping where all thecontamination was when we're doing
a sampling where the hot spots were,making sure these things were reported
(30:07):
out in these quarterly reports thathad to go into the region five EPA.
Yeah.
And at the time, it was pretty contentiousbecause there were lawsuits and there were
multiple lawsuits and then there was apending class action lawsuit for Dow to
clean up everything that was there andand I just sat right in the middle of it.
I was.
(30:27):
They're just doing my job.
And then I went on maternity leave andI came back and the very first phone
call I got back when I was at my deskwas from a it was from a data validator.
Who was an expert in all the EPAmethodologies to actually even
detect some of the chemicalsthat we've been talking about.
(30:50):
And so I had a very high level ofconfidence in what they were doing.
They work for federal government,their entire organization had
government contracts to do this.
And she said, and my nameat the time was was Denny.
And she said, dr. Denny,they won't give me the data.
So what do you mean theywon't give you the data?
And she said.
I can't get the data.
(31:11):
And I said, what do you mean?
And she said, they won't let me have it.
I said, but I already, beforeI went to return, I told
everybody what they had to do.
You need to get the data to herand make sure that it's validated
so we can turn it into the EPA
and so I ended up saying, okaylet me find out what's going on.
(31:33):
I hung the phone up.
And mind you, this is my first call backfrom maternity leave after six weeks.
And I asked my manager and mymanager said, stay out of it.
And I was completely confused becausejust six weeks ago I had this job,
(31:56):
but now I have to stay out of my shop.
I just, nobody was explainingto me what was going on.
But what I also found out was thatthey thought I was coming back after
three months and not six weeks.
So I probed a little bit further.
I called her back on the datavalidator and I said, what's happening?
And she says the laboratory, noneof their machines are calibrated.
(32:18):
There's nothing up to datein terms of their and I'm
getting really technical here.
They're NCLs.
There's a there's an NCL study thathas to be done for all the equipment.
It's called Maxwell controllablelimits for The machines that actually
detect these contaminants, and youtechnically cannot turn in data
that are, analyzed on machines thatare not in compliance with this.
(32:43):
And I was finding outall of these things, and
I said, okay my managersaid to stay out of it.
I was finding out that the datawere being handled improperly, and
these are thousands of samples.
These aren't just, a couple of samplesand they were, They had to go before the
federal government, and not only that,they were and potentially going to be
(33:09):
used in legal action and litigation.
We had a responsibility to makesure that those data were right.
I did and so after having discoveredthat my manager said stay out
of it, and then discovering morediscrepancies, I contacted his manager.
Because that's what you do, right?
(33:29):
So I went to him and I said,this is what's going on.
I said, we've got to,we need to address this.
Why can't we just, let's do the correctthing here, and that's when my hell began.
Wow.
So you wanted to know what I didafter, after school and after and
(33:52):
I still have not changed as a person andas a professional and how I would respond.
Yeah, I can appreciate that.
But I think, there's a reason whyperfectly, I wouldn't say people
that we would normally assumehave a strong moral compass.
(34:13):
Seem to be able to lose that or forgetabout it in a corporate setting.
I think that, I think that's thekindest way to say it is, and
they can be very good people.
They could be pillars of theircommunity, but are somehow check
that out when they get to work.
And at times people confront that and
(34:34):
it's tough in terms of your careerand where you go, but you've
obviously been Survived all thisdone well, and you're now moving
into cybersecurity from all of this.
Yes.
I just, it I want to back up just andask you a little bit, but before we get
to the cybersecurity, you've, you did alot in what I'd call civil engineering.
(34:56):
And, I think that not what I'd callcivil, I think what everybody would
call civil engineering, but the, soyou've done a lot there and how do you
bridge from there to cybersecurity?
It
did not happen overnight, thiskind of revelation, there's key
moments in your life when thingshappen and you're called, right?
(35:21):
Or something calls you want to put it.
And I was on my treadmill.
I'll never forget this.
And I was watching a documentaryand the documentary was on white
nationalists here in the United States.
And, I grew up with my share ofthat, growing up in the South and the
confederate flags and all the hate andso it was part of, my growing up and
(35:50):
then I was hearing about how thesewhite nationalists were organizing
to poison our water systems.
Thanks.
Thanks.
And I was like, wait a minute,you do enough damage and now you
want to poison our water systems.
Come on.
So the flags, you got the torches,do to take the water to, so I was
(36:11):
absolutely incensed, I'm incensed abouta lot of things, um, that aren't right.
But this just took the cake.
Black in the United States is a challenge.
Being a black professional is a challenge.
But my calling, it serves everyone,including those white nationalists.
(36:36):
If they want clean drinking water,okay I'll show up at a waste, a water
treatment plant or a wastewater treatmentplant if it's a reclamation district.
I'll be involved in water efficiencyefforts, energy efficiency efforts
like I was at PG& E in California.
I will do what I can for the environmentbecause I know that's why I'm here.
(36:57):
But that just galled me.
And so I started thinking and it takesa little time sometimes for me to
synthesize everything because I'm usuallybusy and neat, dive deep and whatever
I'm working on at the time and I said,okay, I'm looking back over this career.
I've been in chemicals and the chemicalindustry, major challenge there.
(37:19):
I've been in water and wastewater,I've been in energy, the point
data centers, all these criticalinfrastructure pieces that everyone is
telling particularly the FBI here inthe United States are telling everyone
that, these systems are under attack.
(37:42):
What can I do that makes sensefor this next step in my career?
And then I was introduced, and I'm sograteful, I was introduced to one of the
leading experts in DDoS and distributeddenial of service attacks Dr. Edna Reed
she was an adjunct professor at JamesMadison University until recently, and
(38:05):
my professor I was introduced to her byone of her mentors from the FBI, and he
was our nation's first counterterrorismchief at the FBI following 9 11.
And he's a very good friend ofmine, and I trust him, and he said,
you really need to talk to her.
And she told me about her program.
(38:26):
It's a graduate certificatein cyber intelligence.
And I started thinking I said I don'tnecessarily want to be in cyber security.
Have a background in IT from mygraduate school years, but I didn't
necessarily want to do that type ofwork, but the intelligence piece.
It's fascinating, because you're talkingabout using analytical methods to find
(38:50):
out the who, the when, and the tactics,the techniques, the procedures of these
cyber threat actors, and how they would,compromise our critical infrastructure.
So that.
Is how I got into this space and overthe course of the last 2 to 3 years in
(39:11):
talking with her, I entered the programand now I'm about to finish the program
in December and it has enlightened me.
in ways that I'm, I feel more empoweredto be of assistance in that fight.
Now, yes, it goes back to me watchingthat documentary with a white nationalist,
(39:34):
but I learned then, it's beyond that.
It's the nation state actors that areusing cyber in a ways That can cripple us,
just from delivering hospital services,making sure patients are getting the
right food all the way down to that.
And then all the way to,just this mass scale chaos.
(39:55):
And that's really, I think, whatmost countries, most cyber threat
actors want to impose is thatchaos and that fear, apart from if
they're in the ransomware business.
They want money.
Yeah.
And I think you're absolutely right.
I don't hear enough of it on fromregular media sources, but, and I'm
(40:17):
not I'm just a person who studies data.
The potential for terrorism orwhatever you want to call it.
From that is within North Americaor the U S and Canada is, I think
is totally underestimated thenation states that are attacking us.
I get a lot of pressand we do a lot of that.
(40:39):
But I think the third thing that istotally under underestimated is the degree
to which our civil infrastructure Firstof all can't hold up to attacks, whether
they be from internal or external threats.
The second thing is, I don'tthink anybody realizes how much
of our civil infrastructure hasprobably already been compromised.
(41:00):
Did you, in your studies, youmust've been talking to some of
the sharper people in the industry.
Is that perception held by peoplewho are working in cybersecurity
or at least teaching it these days?
Do people realize the depthto which we are vulnerable?
It's a great question.
For one my, my mentor, my professordefinitely does she's former FBI, CIA.
(41:20):
So she has a very healthyappreciation for that.
But in general I don't know if peoplehaven't been really impacted by
something, then the threat is just oneof the other threats out there, right?
Bye.
The potential for getting in your car andhaving an accident and that type of thing.
(41:41):
It's goes in with that.
But this is different, though,and I think it's a threat and a
fear that people have not faced.
They don't know what it's like atleast here in, in the United States
and other places around the world.
Absolutely.
They know what it's like tohave their infrastructure in a
day be destroyed and decimated.
(42:06):
We have so much privilegeof not having to know that.
Depending upon who you ask and where youask them, and where they lived and what
their experiences have been I don't thinkthere's going to be that sense of alarm.
But, I think the, what a lot of theagencies I'm seeing are trying to do and
(42:28):
they've done for quite some time, but fordifferent reasons, is to prepare people.
Thank you.
For when it happens, and I know livingin the Bay Area, I've lived there for 12
years in San Francisco Bay, the threatof earthquakes is very real, and I became
part of an emergency response team atwork on my job site, and learned how to
prepare for an earthquake at any moment,always have something in your car, always
(42:52):
have something at your house, always havesomething in your office, and the magic
number was at the time when I left, three.
Weeks have something for threeweeks because the first responders
will not be able to get to you.
(43:12):
There's not enough of them.
So the preparedness piece though,is there's definitely a what you
would consider some people call them,fringe, the doomsday preppers or
however, you want to characterize them.
But these folks, they havethe right mentality because
you do want to be prepared.
(43:33):
For when something happens and the firstresponders can't get to you, but, and
it's ironic, you need to have water,you need to have plenty of water.
I think it's, it is different.
I'm old enough to remember Y2K and friendsof mine buying generators and they're
stocking up on food and all that stuff.
(43:54):
And I said, don't be ridiculous.
The We are, we, I lived in Toronto,Canada at the time, where major city,
there was no way that city could dowithout power for more than two days.
Somebody will do something about it.
And I knew people in workingin infrastructure and
hydro and things like that.
(44:15):
And I knew that people wereactively working on this.
I had a great faith intheir ability to handle.
That even the whole Easternseaboard went down in my lifetime.
People came back up, we recovered.
I'm not a survivalist by any stretch ofthe imagination, but I have a generator
and food because I, I don't believe now.
(44:39):
I believe that the infrastructure wehave is so old and so brittle that
it could be taken out by anybody.
And I think we only have tolook at what people, what
hackers have done to healthcare.
To see how quickly they can close downan essential part of our infrastructure.
And I think that's, I don't think I'mno, I wouldn't, I would have dismissed
(44:59):
survivalists at any one point, butI'm now convinced that there will
be a major infrastructure failing.
Yes, I agree.
As a matter of fact, I'm preparingfor a workshop I'm giving on Monday.
It's a simulated cyber attack on theHoover Dam, which, as supplies energy
and water through Lake Mead backto the greater Clark County area.
(45:23):
And part of what I'm doing isthese are water researchers.
That I'm talking to some ofthem are practitioners, but
they're mostly researchers.
And it's about situationalawareness, really.
So am I going there to teachthem cyber security principles?
Absolutely.
Yes, they're going to learn some of that.
Am I going there to teach themabout some of the tactics that
(45:45):
are used by cyber threat actors?
Absolutely.
They're going to learn some of that.
But essentially, what they'regoing to learn is the landscape
and the absolute breath of thepersistence of these types of attacks
on our systems on a daily basis.
And then, if you go into mostof the circles, everyone talks
(46:07):
about living off the land and howthey're already in our systems.
These the adversaries aresitting in our systems now just
waiting for an opportunity time.
And that is.
If we already know that,then how can we expel them?
How can we close the doors?
but a lot of times we justwant to see what they're doing.
(46:28):
So there's that piece, right?
But the situational awareness isimportant because there are still some,
there's still that human component.
That is feeding intowhy they're successful.
There are business email compromises.
There are social engineeringtechniques to be able to
(46:48):
extract information from people.
Just look at the MGM casino heist,I call it the 70 year old makes a
phone call and says, Hey, I need toreset my password, pretending as if,
And so it's these very basic thingsthat we need to start thinking about,
guarding our own PII, which is allthe radio personal identifiable
(47:10):
information is already out there.
Our social security numbers.
We just heard, I, I think everyone'sprofile is on some dark web
website somewhere at some point.
So now it's just really us toup to us to be proactive, but.
Also be vigilant about thetechniques that are being used.
One of the reasons I mostwanted to have this conversation
(47:32):
and it's been fascinating.
I, I am so pleased to have met you.
It's been fascinating, but it's.
I think one of the things westruggle with is getting good
people into cyber security.
And I think a look at your career and whatyou've done and I'm going to say unlikely.
I will totally respect the challengesof growing up black in North, in the
(47:54):
U S and what that does being a womanin this area, being someone who's got
a moral compass that, that needs, thatyou need to work with all of those.
Could be barriers to your progress.
You've obviously smashedthrough all of them.
If you were speaking to otherpeople, be they women or be there
anybody else who was coming in,what would you say to them about
(48:19):
how they might approach acareer in cybersecurity from
what you've seen so far?
Thank you for that questionbecause I mentor a lot of people.
So you're giving me a platformto talk to even more people.
Mentor all genders, all ethnicities,all nationalities people contact
me from around the world askingfor advice and I give them my time.
(48:43):
And usually the first interaction, becauseI have many interactions with them,
over the course of their from when theycontact me, the first conversation I have
with them is really a philosophical one.
And it has to do with knowing yourself.
(49:03):
And again, back to thosequestions, what's going to get
you out of bed every single day.
Sometimes people already know whatthey want to do, but they don't
know how to go about and do it.
So that question becomes, what doyou want to develop as a habit?
(49:28):
That you do every day, whether it's Iget up and I am not just because I'm
talking to you, Joe, but I get up and Ilisten to cyber security today, every day.
That's what I do.
I listened to cyber security today.
I listened to other podcasts, butthis is actually my favorite podcast.
If you want to educate yourself on.
(49:49):
Something new do that.
And that's what I did.
I found cyber security todayout there on Apple podcast.
Okay.
And I started listening and it was Soeducational and natural the way that the,
folks were talking, it was so natural.
Nobody was selling anything.
It wasn't some big marketing push.
(50:11):
It wasn't anything like that.
It was simple.
It was short.
It was to the point.
And so educating yourself andfinding a vehicle that will give you
whatever you need, wherever you are.
So that's the other key pointis not only knowing what will
get you out of bed every day is.
(50:34):
Finding something that's accessible toyou that will inform your decisions.
And then I would say the thirdthing is just finding the people
who will help you reach out.
LinkedIn is an amazing tool.
LinkedIn is probably the best tool inmy opinion, going to conferences and
finding out people who are interestedin you, but also ask questions
(50:57):
when you're at these conferences.
And take away, the fear of someone willthink I'm stupid if I ask this question.
No, ask the question because thatopens you up to, first of all,
getting your question answered.
And second of all, having someoneelse be interested in you.
(51:19):
So with that, cybersecurity is.
It's very much a profession that wantsyou, if you're listening they really
want you as a person to come in andgrapple with some of these things.
When I was putting this conferencetogether, I was just almost overwhelmed
(51:41):
by how complicated this feat is thatwe have every single day, thousands,
if not millions of attacks on systems.
And it's not because they're tryingto do something good, it's their
adversaries trying to do something thatis harmful, and then realizing that.
(52:03):
The internet was never reallybuilt with security in mind.
And I think that's what takes you back.
And there's a fantastic articlecalled The Net of Insecurity from
2015, May 30th, 2015 by CraigTimber from the Washington Post.
How do I know that, thatauthor and the date so well?
Because yesterday I spent a fewhours trying to find that article.
(52:27):
And It is such a good article that talksabout the beginnings of the Internet
as we are experiencing it today andwhy cybersecurity is so necessary
because it was not built to be secure.
Now, I say that with the caveat that.
There are some people like Vint Cerfwho did want to have security embedded
(52:51):
and encryption embedded in the internetin the way that he thought would be
more secure, but he was voted down.
And I'll just leave it at that.
You can read the article.
So that's what I would say to peoplewho are interested in cybersecurity.
We want you I'm breakinginto the profession.
I'm on the cyber intelligence side.
(53:12):
I'm not doing the IT part,although I understand it.
Come there's plenty of work to do.
And on that happy note, thank youso much for this conversation.
This has been fabulous.
And that's our show.
This has been what I hope isthe first in my profile series,
(53:35):
discussions with fascinating people.
I have another of these that I'mreleasing next Tuesday on hashtag
trending my daily tech news show.
Check it out if you're interestedand let me know if you want to
hear or see more stories like this.
You could reach me ateditorial@technewsday.ca.
That's editorial@technewsday.ca.
(53:59):
Or if you're watching this on YouTube,just drop me a note in the comments.
I'm your host, Jim.
Love.
Thanks for listening.
I.
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