by Patrick Appel
Commenting on yesterday’s Nasdaq shutdown, Felix argues that our “system of stock exchanges is so incredibly complex, with so much information flowing around at mind-boggling velocity, that it is certain to fail from time to time — and to fail in unexpected ways”:
As Alexis Madrigal says, the surprising thing isn’t that the Nasdaq broke, it’s that we don’t see this kind of thing far more often.
In fact, if I had the opportunity to interview Edward Snowden, that’s one of the questions I’d love to ask: How well do the NSA’s systems work? How often do they just crash, or otherwise stop working for an unexpected and unpredictable reason? The NSA is dealing with orders of magnitude more data than the Nasdaq, and has to do so in conditions of great secrecy. My guess is that things go wrong on a pretty regular basis. But the real-world consequences of today’s market outage, just like the real-world consequences of the flash crash, were pretty slim. And so too is it hard to determine what if any harm might be done by a temporary failure of America’s national security apparatus.
The Dish 