Shashank Joshi

speaker

204 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 26 Aug

Shashank Joshi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Economist Podcasts · Slip the surly bonds? Scott Bessent goes on a yield trip · 26 Aug 2026 podcast

It's heavy, it's expensive to move, and it's much more localized as a result.

Around 90% of utilities, which are mostly owned by local governments, serve fewer than 10,000 people each.

So if you think about the funding necessary to harden your computer systems and get the latest technology, to get the IT talent that you need to secure these systems, these operators just tend not to have it.

And so the computer system.

systems tend to be obsolete, and we have seen this time and time again.

Iranian hackers broke into the control systems of a New York dam back in twenty thirteen.

In twenty twenty three they seized a pump at a water plant in Pennsylvania.

And I could give you countless other stories of breaches at water utilities.

So alarm bells have been ringing for a long, long time.

So, Jason, part of this is the structural problem of the nature of these water plants, as I just described.

These are small, fragmented.

It's difficult for them to kind of get the resources they need.

But I think the other problem is politics.

So, for example, during the Biden administration, the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, which is the the federal agency that oversees lots of these things, sought to compel states to review and report cyber threats to water systems.

And what happened was the Republican state attorneys general in Missouri, Arkansas, and Iowa, joined by various industry groups, the American Waterworks Association, the National Rural Water Association, they sued the EPA, citing federal overreach and saying, you know, this is burdensome.

You can't put all these federal regulations on us.

And the agency pulled back.

So there has been this sense that the federal government

has struggled to impose its will on states.

And states backed by many Republicans have said we don't want this regulation suffocating us.

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