Let me see if I get this straight.  The third-largest U.S. defense contractor knows how to stop the apocalypse of a “digital war.”  That’s right: we can finally stop predicting when Osama bin Laden will over-chlorinate our toilet water from the comfort of his cave hideout.  The “paradigm shift” is cyber-terrorism, and the solution is … secure email.  We’re saved!  But don’t take my word for it.  Follow [this link] to read the breathless story.

Wikipedia’s “cyber-terrorism” article garnered some much-needed criticism from one of the many curators of knowledge out there.  He tagged the entire page with a “{{weasel}}” banner — an alert that cautions readers “The neutrality or factuality of this article or section may be compromised by weasel words, which can allow the implication of untrue information.”  And of course I fully agree. See [this link] for the current version of this weasel article.

Also from the “we don’t make this up” dept — Ian Johnston, the chief constable for the British Transport Police, has called on Britons to wage a terror campaign (!) against the very politicians he works for. “We need to terrify” them, he proclaimed. Why? Because elected officials “don’t seem to have an appropriate sense of fear” when it comes to cyber crime. They need to get off their fetish for ancient-but-obviously-now-irrelevant notion of physical crime. You know: subway bombings, sarin gas attacks, assassination by radiation poisoning, that sort of trivial ilk… Follow [this link] for the story.

The chief constable may not know it, but The Guardian newspaper fingered Britain in February 2007 as “one of Europe’s crime hotspots” with “the highest rate of burglary” in the EU and a big lead on assaults & hate crimes. But that’s NOTHING compared to the terrorists who commit cyber crime!