Since there really was no such thing in the world as "information warfare," information-warfare people were the weirdest people Van knew. Their tactics and enemies were all imaginary. There was a definite dark-fantasy element to these cyberwar characters. They were like a black flock of the crows of doom, haunting an orc battlefield out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Van was reluctant to pay them any serious attention, because he suffered enough real-world security problems from hacker kids and viruses.