This is truly scary stuff, and can be parleyed by those who seek power into excuses to give more of it to them. Too bad for us that the people who have the catbird seat also have a vested interest in making everything worse. BTW, Vinge is the scheduled guest of honor at LOSCON this year over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Might be a good venue for those of us who find this site rewarding to stage a little get-together??? Cheap, too. Check out the LOSCON.org site.

How vulnerable we are! How easy it would be to shut down ALL satellite communications while simultaneously destroying a large portion of the computing on the ground. North Korea could do it. They’ve already done trial runs for a major cyber attack, and they certainly have the capability of putting enough random small particulate hardware into orbit to shotgun the whole satellite world into a fog of high-velocity projectiles. If I were them, I’d hope for a big quake to hit Southern California, preferably during the late summer dry season. Then I’d have a few people on the ground to start wildfires all over the place simultaneously, all low tech and virtually impossible to detect in advance. By itself, this might overwhelm the response capabilities, but combined with a major quake, for which we’re overdue, and dumping a truckload or two of nasty toxins into the aquaduct and key resevoirs, the whole thing could snowball. Knocking out the sats, while compromising the internet would be the final nail in the coffin that could turn the West Coast into a close simulation of HELL.

Perhaps I shouldn’t mention this, but in the early ’90′s I wrote a paper on using planes against buildings – and combining that attack with anthrax in the mail. The reason? To force the U.S. to abandon its human and civil rights, and to roll back the information revolution that has been so threatening to the corporate/military power hierarchies.

Unfortunately, I think that we can expect more of the same. One of thirty people is a sociopath, and they gravitate to positions of power. See “The Science of Evil,” by Simon Baron-Cohen, and “Political Ponerology,” by Andrew Lobaczewski.

The first shots were fired LONG ago, how about Russia vs Georgia? Nuf said all tools and weapons are open to use in warfare so pucker up and kiss your innocence good bye!

Dan

Read my .99cent ebook. It’s 2048 and It Happened at Nextfest.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004RD9EEY/

Highly recommended. The author is the polymath founder of Red Light Center, now Utherverse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utherverse_Inc.

Time and resources directed in on itself, like the heads of a Hydra attacking each other. This will end very badly, unless we really want something better – and soon.

The various operating systems do not routinely encrypt the data on our machines.

Why? ‘Cause law enforcement wants to catch you with child porn, nuclear secrets, or naughty e-mails.