full-disclosure - Re: III World War.

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Message-ID: <29752.1298931126@localhost>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 17:12:06 -0500
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
To: asmo@...n-station.us
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: III World War. - Broadcast Request.

On Sat, 26 Feb 2011 00:31:47 +0100, asmo said:

> I believe that the IIIWorld War conflict might start in 10 months or 
> more from now. The question is: who's unified and who's willing to 
> participate.
> Leadership is not yet defnied. It may be as well someone well known in 
> IT industry or someone completely unknown.

Almost certainly *not* lead by anybody well known in the IT industry.
Basically, if you manage to start a world war, you're almost by definition
going to have at least two of the permanent members of the UN Security Council
getting on your case (if only one of the five shows up, you've only managed a
regional skirmish, not a world war).  If you get *lucky*, you get France and
the UK militaries beating up on you.  If you're unlucky, one or more of (US,
Russia, China) are going to come looking for you as well.  There's very few IT
organizations that have enough military might to pull that off. (Let's face it
guys - if you can't survive the entire 82nd Airborne dropping in for lunch and
live-fire practice, you're not ready to start a world war.)

And you can rule WWIII == cyberwar right out - the world is interconnected
enough that cyberwar on a "world war" scale is a Bad Idea for the same reason
biological weapons are - it comes back to haunt you.  You may be able to create
a lot of havoc with a cyber attack, but creating enough havoc in any
world-power nation to constitute "victory" is almost certainly going to screw
your *own* country over as well. Consider the recent global economic crisis as
an example - you'd need an event much bigger and messier than that.  And
there's pretty much noplace on earth that's big and high tech enough to launch
that sort of thing and yet not interconnected enough to avoid the backlash.
(That is, of course, also why no cybercriminals have nuked the internet yet - the
ones smart enough to do it are also smart enough to realize that doing so
kills their profit margin).

Biggest danger right now - civil wars from Libya to Pakistan, with perhaps
as many as 400 nuclear warheads in play (around 80-100 each for India,
Pakistan, and Israel, and 100 or so illicit warheads from the former Soviet
Union in the hands of various government and non-government actors).
That *could* evolve into a mess big enough to qualify as a World War, but
only because there *won't* be anybody leading it.

tl;dr: Cool story, bro.

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