BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- The excellent analysis of the smart-grid initiative by MarketWatch columnist Thomas Kostigen pointed out the obvious: There may be more security issues than ever with a so-called smart grid controlling power distribution in the country.

The real likelihood that hackers can break into such a grid is actually not a possibility, but an inevitability. What is always overlooked when these fancy initiatives are unveiled is the nature of the Internet. Read Kostigen's column.

What we need is a distribution system that relies on computer technology for management, but which is completely off the Net itself. Nobody wants to do that.

It is crazy to put all of our eggs in one Internet basket, as the telecommunications scene worldwide is subject to too much hacking. Even a non-Internet network cannot be secured.

This problem goes further than hackers online -- it goes to our overdependence on interconnectivity through common connections.

This week in the San Francisco Bay Area, the fiber-optic cable network was purposely sliced at four distinct locations. Where a hacker cannot succeed, bolt cutters will do. Read more in The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog.

“ We all spent the last month fretting over the Conficker worm that was supposed to ruin the lives of millions on April 1. What was disturbing about the whole episode is that nobody had a clue as to what might happen. ”

Once the cables were cut, Internet service was flaky for the region and completely out for 50,000 customers. On top of that, the landlines would not work and the cell-phone towers in the area went dead.

Does anyone find this sort of interdependency a little disconcerting? It is as if someone was testing the grid for either redundancy or failure points.

Much of the problem stems from the issues with technologies such as fiber optics. They require a level of public trust to work, because the cables must be clearly marked to prevent public works and contractors from accidentally cutting them.

In most parts of the country, there are signs up and down highways, across bodies of water and even in cities marking the location of a fiber-optic line. There are even maps of these things and where they are located.

How much work would it take to find some choke points that you could cut for the purposes of disrupting data communications in an area? How would this affect the so-called smart grid?

The peculiar nature of the four cuts around the Bay Area indicated to me that someone was mapping how they would affect the region, keeping in mind that by cutting the cable in key areas you might be able to take down half the country. If more cuts are made in the future, then someone is trying to reverse-engineer the network to find the most vulnerable points of disruption.

We all spent the last month fretting over the Conficker worm that was supposed to ruin the lives of millions on April 1, but nothing came of it. What was disturbing about the whole episode is that nobody had a clue as to what might happen.

Does this give anyone any confidence that the networked tech scene is in any way safe or secure? And what changed that led us to be so dependent on it?

While taking a lot of things off the Internet might not be a bad idea, keeping them on any network running over the fiber-optic system may not be such a good idea either.

So unless something can be done to assure me that cables cannot be cut and the smart grid is safe from hackers, I would never support these schemes. They put us all at too much risk.