BILL,

I know I don't know much about this Cyber Warfare stuff. I really wish I had a little more knowledge about computer mediated conflict. I guess what you're saying is that we're about three years away from terrorist entities having the capability to take down the Internet. So what would an attack like that look like? Is it simple violence of oppression or something like that the reason for taking out the Internet? I've heard that there might be some literature out there by Eberschloe, Vernton, Lewis, and others discussing possible "Cyber Pearl Harbor" scenarios. It would be great if we had some military capability like the Air Force or civilian capability to fight cyber terrorism like the NSA. Wouldn't it be great if the Department of Homeland Security promoted something like an emergency support functions for cyber events?

BILL, you know that if the eastern seaboard central switching office for almost all Verizon in New Yorks primary region was destroyed in something like 9/11 the entire Internet might collapse. In fact it might take months to get that facility back up and running. I wonder how long it would take to get the stock exchange back up and running through a primary data hub that had been blown up almost completely?

I wonder what a cyber attack would look like. Maybe if there were millions of bots out there capable of attacking simultaneously it might look like a storm. And when they fired up on December 29th I wonder what the entire effect might be? Gee what if a foreign government like China hacked the pentagon daily and ran all of their communications through Israel, Taiwan, Thailand, and other pseudo friendly nations?

If we only could find experts that had touched hundreds of thousands of sites on the Internet or been involved in building large chunks of the Internet. Maybe we could have a reasonable discussion about risk and less hair on fire fear that something might NOT happen. Don't you think prognastications of specific time frames are going to be difficult to back up when they've been occuring since 1968? Did you know that there is a low speed wireless network capable of handling massive amounts of data and is highly redundant and nobody even realizes it exists. It is the ham radio packet radio network. If a bunch of guys with soldering irons and tin hats built something like that I wonder what the telephone companies and military have built?

Bill, do tell us more.