Apropos username.

For me, this issue is a higher level debate. As we move further toward the dystopian future of a blurry mess of city-state-like government rule, where corporate interests are openly the agenda of the government focus - network security will be more paramount than physical (militaristic) security.

There will always be the deterrent of 'metal-on-target' physical force - and that deterrent will always not be enough to dissuade some groups from standing up and fighting for [whatever].

Governments really are a self-serving concept, where they exist to extract resources from the base they rule over to support themselves. The exchange is sold to the constituency as "safety" or "national security" -- but the safety and security are really there to protect the source of the governments resources -- not protect the individual people in any way shape or form. The government cant have the source of its income and resources being killed or destroyed.

As we get further into this information age (which we are just barely into its infancy) we will see that we really have economic factions at play (this is the premise for the NWO, BTW - a range of economic centers which all produce and trade in an incestuous way and historical nationalistic definitions have given way to resource/production classifications) who are ruling organizations that manage policy and law that specifically protects their economic interests (of the military industrial complex).

This is not too different than what we already have today - but it is not quite as openly obvious to people yet that this is where we are heading.

In this next phase of civilization - we will see that information warfare will be constant and (mostly) secret.

I posted previously about the Chinese hacking Lockheed when I worked there a few years ago (spear phishing, but super sophisticated) and had a bunch of people on HN not believe it.

We are at war with china already - and many have predicted that it will become physical in the next 20 years -- who knows if it will - but the information war will continue for sure.

The governments effectively have a resource base that they extract value from in order to prop up their existence. The corporate sector that serves the government infrastructure is a constant and evil feedback loop into which all this plays.

What we are seeing is the shifting of the arms race from physical to digital.

The US has just assumed a position of "we do whatever the fuck we want" (hence the global reach of sigint NSA and echelon) and china is pretty brazen in its tactics of smiling at the market place while not-so-secretly mounting massive cyber attacks against your digital borders.

While the US has massive head start in tech right now - the chinese have been doing an utterly amazing job of securing pretty much all the resources in Africa.

It is my opinion, that economic war has been waged against Africa and countries with oil in the mid-east in order to suppress progress and advancement in those areas as a method of ensuring their resources are not developed or harvested so that they are effectively stored for later extraction by corporate interests of the US and other nations where the production cost to market value is really high. E.g. Iraq, the number 2 oil reserve in the world has been prevented from developing its oil production capabilities through flimsy at best political BS and outright lies at worst in order to ensure their oil does not reach peak while at the same time the global market and oil price goes up.

We have effectively put a permanent army in place to protect those fields and control (and profit from) its later production. Much like we have done with the global supply of opium from Afghanistan.

Its all about control.