Michael Hayden is being provocative -- attempting to provoke debate. This is an excellent, laudable act, and should be warmly welcomed.

So, here is my response:-

There is an element of truth to what Michael Hayden is saying, although his analysis of the situation is enormously telling, and reveals a lot about the culture that prevails in the corridors of power.

It is true that the internet is creating communities and groups that do not fit into the old hierarchies of power and control. New communications technologies forge new arenas of discourse; they bring together new communities and interest groups, largely unconstrained by geography, culture, religion or (increasingly) language. These groups are beginning to find common cause, recognize their political power, and flex their (political) muscles.

It is natural and proper that those who benefit from the status-quo should feel nervous. This technological watershed (and the movement of movements that it has triggered) does indeed pose an existential threat to many organisations that predicate their existence on the primacy and sovereignty of the Nation State.

To labor the point: Notions of sovereignty and the plenipotentiary power of the state are weakened and undermined when individuals discover that their shared humanity cuts across international boundaries, and that the "tribe" to which they pledge allegiance is neither best defined nor best constrained in terms of militarily defensible contiguous geographical regions.

So, political and economic elites that are strongly aligned with the interests and primacy of the nation state really do face an existential threat, albeit a distributed, generally non-violent, tides-of-history type threat, rather than one that is focused around a particular "enemy" posing a specific and identifiable physical threat.

As I mentioned previously, Hayden's response to this threat is telling, and reveals much about his (and the Agency's) predispositions and cognitive biases.

Firstly, he thinks immediately of a physical threat - of hostile groups seeking revenge. He sees the world in terms of "friends" and "enemies", in terms of coherent and organised groups that can be treated as atomic units, and imbued with anthropomorphic characteristics: "anger", "revenge" and so on.

Secondly, he seeks to (at the same time) elevate and exaggerate the threat posed by this (notional) group, to make it relevant to the political mainstream, by speculating about attacks on civilian infrastructure - exactly what he would have needed to do during the inevitable internecine budgetary battles that he would have fought during his tenure with the NSA. As a former department head, this is necessarily his area of expertise, and the home turf on which he feels most comfortable.

This second aspect is particularly dangerous in that he seeks to incite and provoke the very threat that he spends so much effort warning us about. He ruthlessly exploits our tribalistic, pack-animal ancestry, conjuring up hostile groups where none exist; engineering conflict in a callous game of divide-and-conquer.

So, we have two threads in his speculation:-

The latter thread being part of a persistent and habitual strategy of scaremongering and conflict creation -- the better to secure a bigger slice of the budgetary pie for "the boys", is rather more transparent (and consequentially less interesting) than the former - the expectation that his foes will always form coherent and organised groups, capable of "making demands", and of acting in a manner amenable to anthropomorphic analysis. This contrasts rather well with one competing view -- that sees the world as a collection of ad-hoc networks of ideas and social mechanisms, some forming, others dissolving -- clearly structured, but not at all hierarchical.