The Fire Sale

Fire Sale, I first heard this term in the movie Die Hard 4.0 starring Bruce Willis, Justin Long and many others, where a hacker, played by Timothy Olyphant, who was once the chief programmer of the Department of Defense of The United States of America launches a fire sale over the national infrastructure of America. Fire Sale originally means the sale of goods at extremely discounted prices indicating bankruptcy or in professional sports it means the trading of players, especially the veterans, to another team in exchange of younger players.

However, in this case a Fire Sale is a three step systematic attack on an entire country’s national infrastructure. Step one, take out all transportation. Step two, take out the financial base and telecoms and then step three is to get rid of all utilities like gas, water, electricity, nuclear, etc. pretty much anything that is run by computers which today is almost everything. This attack is called Fire Sale because everything must go – Matthew Farrell. When I heard about the fire sale I thought it would be cool, cool if you were on the side of the hacker and if you were part of the ones who are doing the fire sale. Wouldn't it be cool if you could control everything with your own hands? It would be like playing god (that’s enough playing sinister for now). Imagine what a block of code could do to an entire nation if it would be used by the wrong people. It would be like living back in the stone age where all kinds of utilities cannot be used. No cell phones, no internet, no transportation and much worse no electricity and water. This implies how powerful technology can be. However, it also implies that technology also has a downfall because if this ever happens to a country, it would be possible to launch a fire sale if everything is run by computers. To better understand what a fire sale is I suggest you watch the movie Die Hard 4.0: Live Free or Die Hard.