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The age of distributed threat

Red Herring has an article about Supernova panel moderated by Doc Searls that discusses Fighting networked wars.

John Robb, author: Warfare is changing to an attack on critical points in infrastructures to create damage far beyond the cost of an attack. Al Qaeda sees the West as a system that it must attack on a distributed basis to make the most of its limited resources.

How do you fight these folks? Looking at the size of these networks, what is characteristic of al Qaeda and affiliated organizations looks like a crime network combined with traditional terror. They have mastered terrorist best practices and that has allowed him to unplug the organization from nation-states, which subverts the nation-state system itself. Al Queda is in a new zone. They have no restrictions on behavior.

A distributed problem has to have a distributed response.

Exactly, and that is one of the central arguments of White Rose, if you address a distributed threat such as terrorism by tightening and establishing centrally imposed and managed security, you will produce a sense of false security and ‘crowd out’ the only distributed security – the individual and in the society.

1 comment to The age of distributed threat

  • The “distributed threat” is a point we American citizens have not yet come to embrace. We citizens, not our soldiers or police officers, are the targets of terrorists. We are involuntarily drafted soldiers into the war against terrorists. (We are fighting terrorists–people–not terrorism, which is an idea.) Who ever won a war by disarming his soldiers?

    My interest, as an airline pilot and Editor of ASInsider.com and our blog, is airline security. I find watching my fellow citizens give up their rights at airport government-searching points without even a thought extremely frustrating. “The government” has never been able to protect us; neither, according to the courts in the US, is it obliged to.

    We have gone too far down the road of government dependency in all areas. In the regime of airline security it cost us 3000 lives at the hands of just 19 madmen who were armed only with small edged weapons. If that is not symptomatic of a failed security paradigm, what is? How could that message be clearer?

    Until we take back our country and resume responsibility for taking care of ourselves, we are simply waiting for the next 9/11. Disarmed and defenseless is not safe. It is an invitation to terrorists. It is pathetic and inexcusable and should not be tolerated by a supposedly free people.

    Scott Lewis