David Sternlight wrote:
My personal recollection... high speed fighter-bomber aircraft ...
I'm talking about some of the information that started slowly leaking out later, not the prime-time TV pyrotechnics.
Well, a lot of stuff "leaked out", but I'm not sure how much was actually acknowledged to be true. There was the thing about the "virus" in the printer drivers, or something like that, but I seriously don't see how any sort of software "attack" would have much significance once the Iraqi national microwave network was blasted into oblivion. The point is that I don't personally believe that there's much of a credible threat of one of these "Infowar Attacks" that this new commission plans to anticipate (by some means of divination; I am really eager to see what that turns out to be). Commercial systems are disparate enough and so inherently flaky that I doubt some terrorist agency could do much worse than your run-of-the-mill catastrophic system failure. The power grid is an exception, perhaps, but to attack that with any sort of real effect would probably require a physical attack, and in any case even the grid seems capable of random failures that bring about random chaos without the need for creepy foreigners. I also dispute the "lighthouse" story. That setup only is meaningful when there's a service necessary to the well-being of the community in a situation where no mechanism for ready cash flow to a provider exists. I question the premise that commercial suppliers of security systems & consulting can't solve corporate security problems effectively. Indeed, a good argument could be made that we're better defended by a wide variety of different security systems, rather than a single General Issue Uncle Sam Security System. ______c_____________________________________________________________________ Mike M Nally * Tiv^H^H^H IBM * Austin TX * For the time being, m5@tivoli.com * m101@io.com * <URL:http://www.io.com/~m101> * three heads and eight arms.