A third eye for process safety

After the BP oil rig disaster, authorities in the US are now planning to monitor the critical parameters of all oil rigs from land. An article mentions that the system will "put real-time data from offshore wells in front of government-employed petroleum engineers, who could keep a close watch during vital drilling operations or whenever anomalies are detected.Many drilling contractors and oil companies already use high-tech monitoring systems to keep track of what's happening offshore -- even from computer centers hundreds of miles inland".
Now while this is a good idea, it throws up another window regarding security of such networks. Just imagine if someone was able to unauthorizedly break into these networks!
I personally feel that while technology can be an enabler,it cannot solve all problems. Read the full article in this link.