listening to an npr piece on the stuxnet worm, which is apparently tantamount to a weapon of terror. but the expert was saying: well it was a well-funded, well-organized effort. "it could be organized crime," he said, "or worse, a government." that's a pretty good representation of where the real threat comes from. then these same people will autonomically decry and suppress all "non-state actors" as obviously illegitimate, while giving more control over these networks precisely to states. (one among many reasons to line up with wikileaks.)

the piece at least presented the speculation (which surely would occur first to almost anyone) that it was built by the israeli government, or for that matter the u.s., as it appears to have been trained on the iranian nuclear program. (at a guess: um, israel.) but it left the impression that a state cyber-attack is a brand new idea. it's an open secret that the russian secret services have run attacks on estonia and georgia. you can't tell me that cheney didn't have teams working on worms, and if i know my obama he just kept right on. escape into the environment makes a nice doomsday scenario, if you're writing a film script.

at any rate, maybe the story of stux will come out or maybe not. if you could persuade the mossad that you could significantly damage or set back the iranian nuclear effort without risking any lives &c they'd be foolish not to give it a whirl before they resort to air raids. indeed for all we know this thing did do some damage.