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Friday, February 1, 2013

The War In The Ether

There is a war going on. This is of course not news - humanity has been in a near-constant state of conflict since there has been humanity. But this war is different.
There are no bombs, no bullets, and no bandages. There are nation-states and militaries fighting this war, and there are cypherpunks and black-hats fighting this war. We see rumblings from time-to-time: the Red October network, Wikileaks, the recent hacks at the New York Times. The weapons of this war have strange names and are peristent, like NBC weapons: Mahdi, Stuxnet, Flame, LOIC.
There are deaths, too. Aaron Swartz was one.

The war is for information. Who has it, who wants it, who controls the flow of information. By controlling information, you can control how other people make decisions, how they think, what they can make happen. This has been a fundamental feature of war as well - spycraft, deception, intel. But now conflict appears on a platform of pure information, the weapons made of bits and bytes, the soldiers working from computers spread out across the globe.

The future isn't coming - it is already here.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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