health insurance.

There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of
computer-chips. When they do break down, it is a daunting challenge to
figure out what the heck has gone wrong with them. A broken cordboard
generally had a problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has
invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad software can be
so subtle as to be practically theological.

If you want a mechanical system to do something new, then you must
travel to where it is, and pull pieces out of it, and wire in new
pieces. This costs money. However, if you want a chip to do something
new, all you have to do is change its software, which is easy, fast and
dirt-cheap. You don't even have to see the chip to change its program.
Even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much. A chip with
program X doesn't look one whit different from a chip with program Y.

With the proper codes and sequences, and access to specialized
phone-lines, you can change electronic switching systems all over
America from anywhere you please.

And so can other people. If they know how, and if they want to, they
can sneak into a microchip via the special phonelines and diddle with
it, leaving no physical trace at all. If they broke into the
operator's station and held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very
obvious. If they broke into a telco building and went after an
electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at least leave
many traces. But people can do all manner of amazing things to
computer switches just by typing on a keyboard, and keyboards are
everywhere today. The extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark,
broad, almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of
life about any computer on a network.

Security experts over the past twenty years have insisted, with growing
urgency, that this basic vulnerability of computers represents an
entirely new level of risk, of unknown but obviously dire potential to
society. And they are right.

An electronic switching station does pretty much everything Letitia
did, except in nanoseconds and on a much larger scale. Compared to
Miss Luthor's ten thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching
computer, 60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines. And the current AT&T
system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.

An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line on its "board" in a
tenth of a second, and it does this over and over, t