A court in China’s Xinjiang region has sentenced five people to death for murder and other crimes over deadly ethnic riots in July, state media said.

Two other people were sentenced to life imprisonment, Xinhua news agency said.

Nine people were executed last month over the riots in which nearly 200 people were killed.

Chinese officials have said most of the victims were members of China’s majority Han ethnic group who were attacked by ethnic Uighurs.

Xinhua’s report named the five sentenced to death as Memeteli Islam, Mamattursun Elmu, Memeteli Abburakm, Kushiman Kurban and Helil Sadir.

Eight other people received jail terms, Xinhua said, including the two sentenced to life in prison.

Struggle to restore order

The five sentenced to death all appear to be Uighurs, judging by their names, correspondents say. The Uighurs are a Turkic minority in China that calls Xinjiang their homeland.

Ethnic tensions exploded on 5 July as Uighurs in Urumqi protested over clashes at a factory in southern China that had left two Uighurs dead.

Shops were smashed and vehicles set alight, with passers-by being set upon by Uighur rioters.

Two days later, groups of Han went looking for revenge as police struggled to restore order.

Officials say 197 people were killed and about 1,700 people injured in the rioting.

A total of 34 people have now been convicted over the rioting, for crimes including murder, arson, property damage and robbery.

Besides Thursday’s five death sentences, three other people have been given the death penalty with a two-year reprieve, a sentence which is usually commuted to life in jail.

The rest have received lesser jail terms.

Five more cases are due to be heard by the Intermediate People’s Court in Urumqi on Friday.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The White House warned Iran Tuesday that it faces further sanctions if “they don’t stop their enrichment activities, if they don’t forsake their nuclear weapons program.”

“Our allies are serious about addressing this head-on,” President Barack Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs told CNN. “I think it would be wise for the Iranians to uphold their responsibilities” to the international community.

“This is up to them. Time is indeed running out,” he said.

Iran denies it plans to build nuclear weapons, saying its nuclear program is for civilian electricity and medical research.

Obama’s spokesman refused to rule out military action against the Islamic state, but said “I think first and foremost we will examine what type of sanctions will have an impact on Iran.”

Gibbs was speaking on the heels of a declaration by Iran that not only will it move ahead with plans to build 10 new nuclear plants, it will take legal action over infringements on its nuclear rights.

“We will not do away with our rights,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said at a news conference Tuesday, without clarifying what legal action meant.

He did say that Iran would write letters of protest to nations that backed a U.N. resolution of rebuke over Iran’s nuclear program.

Mehmanparast accused such countries of politicizing nuclear fuel as a way to meddle in his country’s domestic affairs.

“We will elaborate on why their decisions were incorrect, and how to correct and what the consequences might be,” he said of the letters.

Locations have been chosen for five of the 10 new nuclear plants, according to Tabnak, a Web site owned by former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezaie.

“These five locations are situated in northern provinces and in the Darkhowain region in Khuzestan,” Tabnak said Tuesday, quoting PANA News.

The board of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, on Friday passed a resolution demanding that Iran stop construction on a once-secret nuclear enrichment facility in the Iranian holy city of Qom.

Twenty-five countries, including Russia and China, backed the measure, which also demanded that Iran stop uranium enrichment, which can be used for producing fuel for a nuclear device.

In the resolution’s wake, Iran’s state news agency reported Sunday that the nation’s Cabinet had authorized the construction of 10 new nuclear production facilities.

At Tuesday’s news conference in the Iranian capital, Tehran, Mehmanparast said his country needs nuclear fuel from the plants to meet its long-term energy needs, to move toward self-sufficiency.

“The plans we have, we will push our plans ahead,” the foreign minister said. “We will adhere to IAEA framework and under their supervision.

“We remain committed to the NPT,” he added, referring to the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which bars member states from pursuing nuclear weapons and requires international inspectors to have access to nuclear facilities. The treaty gives Iran the right to produce nuclear fuel, Iran says.

Tehran says the plants authorized Sunday would produce enough enriched uranium to yield about 20,000 megawatts of electricity a year. Iran currently has one nuclear power plant, which has yet to begin full operation.

By comparison, 65 nuclear power plants in the United States produced about 800,000 megawatts of power in 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

In his final report to the IAEA’s governing board, outgoing Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei said Thursday that the agency has been able to verify that no known stocks of nuclear fuel have been diverted from authorized uses. But he said inspectors “have effectively reached a dead end” without further Iranian cooperation.

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Monday that, in the United States’ view, “as Iran makes choices that seem to indicate that it is not at this stage ready and willing to take up the offers on the engagement track, then we will put greater emphasis on the pressure track.”

The “pressure track” is often code language for the pursuit of further U.N. Security Council sanctions.

TWITTER GANGS “INTERNET THUGZ”

The city’s street gangs are becoming tweet gangs.

Manhattan’s young thugs have turned to Twitter, and the cops who track them are fast behind, the Daily News has learned.

It’s old-school crime meets new technology: attacks being plotted – and thwarted – 140 characters at a time.

One investigator recently warned parents and teens that the bastion of OMG and LOL has been infiltrated by violent crews waging turf wars.

A boy shot in the leg weeks earlier on Lenox Ave. may have been targeted because of a battle the Original Young Gangsters crew started on Twitter.

“It’s horrible,” NYPD Lt. Kevin O’Connor of Manhattan North’s gang intelligence unit told a forum in Harlem.

A basic search of the social-networking site for OYG or Jeff Mob, the gang based in the Jefferson Houses in East Harlem, yields shout-outs and throwdowns.

“I knoe b**ches from oyg that would dead mob yah s–t in harlem,” one girl wrote in a series of tweets aimed at drawing out a rival for a fight.

Investigators are monitoring the traffic in hopes of sweeping up gangbangers before the bloodshed – and searching Twitter after attacks for clues.

“It is another tool … just like old phone records,” a police source said. “We can go through them [messages] to track these guys.”

Harlem pastor Vernon Williams, who runs Perfect Peace Ministry Youth Outreach, said his staff uses Twitter, MySpace and instant messaging to keep track of 4,000 at-risk teens.

A week ago, Twitter helped the volunteers stop a street war after they saw the Get Money Boys, based in the St. Nicholas Houses on W. 127 St., exchanging threats with Goodfellas and The New Dons, based just a few blocks north.

“They were threatening to go and hurt two people,” said Williams, 51, who sent staff out to find the tweeters.

An NYPD spokesman and the Manhattan district attorney’s office declined comment on the phenomenon, and Twitter did not respond to e-mails.

Gang members who grew up in the digital age are blasé about their tweeting.

One 15-year-old in the 28 Gunnaz gang said it’s just like any other “form of communication,” except that the world can listen in on the conversation.

That feature can actually fuel disputes. A heated exchange between rivals on the service can turn into a full-fledged beef when others get wind, he said.

A 15-year-old nicknamed Lil V, who belongs to The New Dons, says Twitter is useful for “settin’ up the fights” and making plans.

He seemed aware that the cops or anyone else could follow them – and said the gang takes precautions, using lingo gangsters from an earlier era wouldn’t even understand.

“We got our own page,” Lil V said. “Our page is private.”

Engineers operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have smashed together proton beams in the machine for the very first time.

The step was described as a “great achievement” for those working on the huge physics experiment.

The low-energy collisions came after researchers circulated two beams simultaneously in the LHC’s 27km-long tunnel earlier on Monday.

The LHC is smashing together beams of protons to shed light on the cosmos.

Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC is the world’s largest machine and will create similar conditions to those present moments after the Big Bang.

Scientists will search for signs of the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that is crucial to our current understanding of physics.

Although it is predicted to exist, scientists have not yet detected it.

Researchers working on the collider have said they are delighted with the quick progress made since the machine restarted on Friday.

“It’s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time,” said Cern’s director-general Rolf Heuer.

“But we need to keep a sense of perspective – there’s still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme.”

Smashing news

Housed in a tunnel 100m beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the LHC uses some 1,200 “superconducting” magnets to bend proton beams in opposite directions around the tunnel at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the “ring”, the proton beams cross, smashing into one another with enormous energy.

Large “detector” machines located at these crossing points will scour the wreckage of the collisions for discoveries that could roll back the frontiers of knowledge.

The giant Atlas detector was the first to see collisions

The four main detectors at the LHC are: Atlas, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), Alice and LHCb. Atlas and CMS are so-called multi-purpose detectors, while Alice and LHCb are designed with more specific scientific investigations in mind.

Cern’s director of communications, Dr James Gillies, said the first collisions had taken place just as a news conference was under way on Monday to discuss progress following the machine’s restart at the weekend.

“We didn’t have time to analyse them then. We waited until all four of the (detectors) had seen good candidates (for collisions),” he told BBC News.

Quick progress

The giant Atlas detector was the first to record candidate collisions at 1322 GMT. But CMS failed to see any on the first try. Alice and LHCb saw their first candidate collisions after 1600 GMT.

Operators then went back and adjusted the beam to generate collisions in the Compact Muon Solenoid detector. This time, they were successful, with the first candidates seen at around 1820 GMT.

Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the Atlas scientific team, commented: “This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years’ work by the international community.”

The spokesperson for the Alice experiment, Jurgen Schukraft, said cheers erupted with the first collisions.

“This is simply tremendous,” he said.

Engineers restarted the LHC on Friday evening after a 14-month hiatus while the machine was being repaired.

It had to be shut down shortly after its inauguration when an electrical fault led to magnets being damaged and to one tonne of liquid helium leaking into the tunnel.

Web security firm McAfee released a report warning of a “cyber space race,” with countries like U.S., Israel, Russia, China, and France gearing up for cyber offensives.

The McAfee report was prepared by cybersecurity expert Paul Kurtz, a former White House adviser. It said cyberattacks were on the rise and “cyberwarfare is a reality.”

“Over the past year, the increase in politically motivated cyberattacks has raised alarm and caution, with targets including the White House, Department of Homeland Security, US Secret Service and Department of Defense in the US alone.

“Nation-states are actively developing cyberwarfare capabilities and involved in the cyber arms race, targeting government networks and critical infrastructures,” the report said.

The Web security company said critical infrastructure such as power grids, transportation, telecommunication, finance and water supplies was particularly vulnerable.

“In most developed countries, critical infrastructure is connected to the Internet and lacks proper security functions, leaving these installations vulnerable to attacks,” McAfee said.

On November 12-13, 2009, I attended the 19th Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law Conference presented by the American Bar Association (ABA) Standing Committee on Law and National Security.  Select here for latest copy of program agenda.

The following podcast links are from the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security web site.  I highly recommend watching the panel on “Modern Piracy”.

Podcasts

• Opening Remarks – Carolyn Lamm
  Panel I – Executive Update on Developments in National Security Law
• Panel II – Legislative Update on Developments in National Security Law and Keynote Address – Hon. James B. Steinberg
• Panel III – Emerging Issues in National Security Law: Narco-Violence Along the Border
• Friday Opening Remarks – Professor John Norton Moore
  Panel IV – Modern Piracy: Legal and Policy Options
• Panel V – Military Commissions
• Panel VI - Cyber Security and Cyber Warfare

Over the course of two days, I noted the following which I found interesting enough to mention here:

• General Counsel for DHS was the only one in the first panel discussion one to mention cyber security as a top issue.
• When topic of interaction between Title 10 & Title 50 came up during the first discussion, many of the panelists had very little to say (as if they were avoiding it).
• According to Martin Murphy, modern piracy should be viewed as an organized crime problem.
• Based on the comments by the shipping industry representative, shipping companies do not consider piracy an issue because they can just avoid the area or pay the ransom and there is very little impact on cost.  Mostly a personal safety issue of employees.
• There are forty threshold legal issues associated with cyber strategy.
• According to FBI rep at the cyber panel, hackers are targeting law firms and public relations firms.  Since this conference there have been a number of stories that have come out about this statement.
• Someone in the crowd stood up and said that Raytheon had been penetrated by known foreign power.  I can’t find anything in open press to support this statement.

BERLIN – Afghanistan has slipped three places to become the world’s second most-corrupt country despite billions in aid meant to bolster the government against a rising insurgency, according to an annual survey of perceived levels of corruption.

Only lawless Somalia, whose weak U.N.-backed government controls just a few blocks of the capital, was perceived as more corrupt than Afghanistan in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

Iraq saw some improvement, rising to 176 of 180 countries, up two places up from last year. Singapore, Denmark and New Zealand were seen as the least corrupt countries in the list based on surveys of businesses and experts.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai’s inability or unwillingness to tackle cronyism and bribery the past five years have resulted in an increase of support for the Taliban insurgents. That has prompted calls by the Obama administration for Karzai to tackle the practice or risk forfeiting U.S. aid.

Since 2001, the U.S. Congress has appropriated more than $39 billion in humanitarian and reconstruction assistance for Afghanistan, according to a report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. European nations send about 1 billion euros ($1.49 billion) a year, a total of 9 billion euros since 2002.

International donors are increasingly questioning how much of the billions of dollars in aid might have been misappropriated.

The report said examples of Afghan corruption ranged from the sale of government positions to daily bribes for basic services.

Karzai unveiled an anti-corruption unit and major crime fighting force on Monday after heavy pressure from Washington.

In reaction to the report, Ershad Ahmadi, the deputy director general of the High Office of Oversight and Anti-corruption in Afghanistan, said that “corruption is a phenomenon that will not go away overnight. It is a problem that will continue to be with Afghanistan for a long time.

“Until we achieve that sort of national awakening that business as usual is not in the interest of a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan, you will not be able to achieve success in your anti-corruption campaign,” Ahmadi said.

Robin Hodess, Transparency’s director of policy and research, said Tuesday that for a country to improve on the corruption perceptions index, it is imperative that “citizens believe that they have a government that works for them.”

The governments have to show “that there is the political will to respond to the needs of the people,” Hodess said.

In Iraq, corruption has become widespread since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 with scarcity of serious government measures against corrupted officials.

That has undermined the largest nation-building efforts with siphoning billions of dollars away from the country’s struggling economy, increasing frustrations among Iraqis mainly over corruption, lingering violence and poor public services.

A Bertelsmann Foundation report used in the corruption index noted that in Iraq “non-security institutions remain weak and debilitated. The Iraqi leadership faces many structural constraints on governance, such as a massive brain drain, a high level of political division, and extreme poverty.”

The United States, which was in 19th place compared with 18th last year, remained stable despite Transparency’s concerns over a lack of government oversight of the financial sector.

The report also pointed out that the U.S. legislature is another reason for concern, as it is “perceived to be the institution most affected by corruption.”

There were some bright spots in the new report — Bangladesh, Belarus, Guatemala, Lithuania, Poland and Syria were among the countries that improved the most.

Via: Yahoo! News.

BEIJING – President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he met briefly with a half brother who lives in China and who recently wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about the abusive Kenyan father they share.

Obama, who spent three days in China during his first official tour of Asia, acknowledged the meeting in an interview with CNN. He offered no details. An aide said later that the meeting took place Monday night after Obama arrived in Beijing, the Chinese capital.

The White House had declined to say whether the president and Mark Ndesandjo would meet. And no White House official mentioned the visit until Obama did when asked about it.

“I don’t know him well. I met him for the first time a couple of years ago,” Obama told CNN. “He stopped by with his wife for about five minutes during the trip.”

Describing the meeting as “overwhelming” and “intense,” Ndesandjo told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he had long anticipated the chance to welcome his famous brother to China.

“I think he came directly off the plane, changed some clothes and then came down and saw us,” Ndesandjo said. “And he just gave me a big hug. And it was so intense. I’m still over the moon on it. I am over the moon. And my wife. She is his biggest fan and I think she is still recovering.”

In the CNN interview, Obama said he hadn’t read his brother’s book, “Nairobi to Shenzhen,” which features a protagonist who is the son of a Jewish mother and an abusive father from Kenya.

Ndesandjo has revealed in previous interviews that his father, Barack Obama Sr., beat him and his mother. The president also wrote about his father, who abandoned him as a child, in his best-selling memoir.

“It’s no secret that my father was a troubled person,” Obama said. “Anybody who has read my first book, ‘Dreams from My Father,’ knows that, you know, he had an alcoholism problem, that he didn’t treat his families very well. Obviously it’s a sad part of my history and my background but it’s not something I spend a lot of time brooding over.”

Ndesandjo said he bought tickets months ago to fly from the southern boomtown of Shenzhen, where he has lived since 2002, to Beijing, in hopes of reconnecting with his brother. The two last met in January when Ndesandjo attended Obama’s inauguration as a family guest.

The three chatted on Monday, with Obama being introduced to Ndesandjo’s wife, a native of Henan, China, whom he married a year ago, he said. He gave few details of what they discussed.

“All I can say is, we talked about family, and it was very powerful because when he came in through that door, and I saw him and I hugged him, and he hugged me and hugged my wife. It was like we were continuing a conversation that had started many years ago,” he said.

The two men did not grow up together. Ndesandjo’s mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.’s third wife. Before arriving in Beijing on Monday, Obama had been in a townhall-style meeting with students in Shanghai, and joked that a family gathering at his house “looks like the United Nations.”

President Obama’s father had been a Kenyan exchange student who met his mother, Kansas native Stanley Ann Dunham, when they were in school in Hawaii. The two separated two years after he was born.

The senior Obama married Ndesandjo’s mother after divorcing the president’s mother. They returned to Kenya to live, where Mark and his brother, David, were born and raised.

Obama Sr. died in an automobile accident in 1982 at age 46.

Ndesandjo lives near Hong Kong and earns a living as a marketing consultant. For most of that time, he has maintained a low profile, with few people knowing of his connection to the U.S. president.

Via: Yahoo! News.

(CNET) – Major countries and nation-states are engaged in a “Cyber Cold War,” amassing cyberweapons, conducting espionage, and testing networks in preparation for using the Internet to conduct war, according to a new report to be released on Tuesday by McAfee.

In particular, countries gearing up for cyberoffensives are the U.S., Israel, Russia, China, and France, the says the report, compiled by former White House Homeland Security adviser Paul Kurtz and based on interviews with more than 20 experts in international relations, national security and Internet security.

“We don’t believe we’ve seen cases of cyberwarfare,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee. “Nations have been reluctant to use those capabilities because of the likelihood that [a big cyberattack] could do harm to their own country. The world is so interconnected these days.”

Threats of cyberwarfare have been hyped for decades. There have been unauthorized penetrations into government systems since the early ARPANET days and it has long been known that the U.S. critical infrastructure is vulnerable.

However, experts are putting dots together and seeing patterns that indicate that there is increasing intelligence gathering and building of sophisticated cyberattack capabilities, according to the report titled “Virtually Here: The Age of Cyber Warfare.”

“While we have not yet seen a ‘hot’ cyberwar between major powers, the efforts of nation-states to build increasingly sophisticated cyberattack capabilities, and in some cases demonstrate a willingness to use them, suggest that a ‘Cyber Cold War’ may have already begun,” the report says.

Because pinpointing the source of cyberattacks is usually difficult if not impossible, the motivations can only be speculated upon, making the whole cyberwar debate an intellectual exercise at this point. But the report offers some theories.

For instance, Alperovitch speculates that the July 4 attacks denial-of-service on Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea could have been a test by an foreign entity to see if flooding South Korean networks and the transcontinental communications between the U.S. and South Korea would disrupt the ability of the U.S. military in South Korea to communicate with military leaders in Washington, D.C., and the Pacific Command in Hawaii.

“The ability of the North Koreans to disable cybercommunications between the U.S. and South Korea would give them a huge strategic advantage” if they were to attack South Korea, he said.

There have been earlier attacks that smack of cyberwarfare too. Estonian government and commercial sites suffered debilitating denial-of-service attacks in 2007, and last year sites in Georgia were attacked during the South Ossetia war, orchestrated by civilian attackers, the report says.

The report concludes that if we aren’t seeing it already, cyberwarfare will be a reality soon enough.

“Over the next 20 to 30 years, cyberattacks will increasingly become a component of war,” William Crowell, a former NSA deputy director, is quoted as saying. “What I can’t foresee is whether networks will be so pervasive and unprotected that cyberwar operations will stand alone.”

The current financial collapse has the West hearing phrases not heard before: “exploding deficits” and “devastating inflation,” with the situation possibly getting “worse than the Great Depression.” In the end, the “magnitude of the debacle” may cause the situation to “fragment disastrously” on a global level.

Perhaps the most profound statement heard is that “nations will be redefined and their futures fundamentally altered,” uttered by Rupert Murdoch.

As one commentator put it, “We are all in trouble.”

These are sobering times. Uncertainty grips every level of Western civilization.

Families are uncertain whether they will keep their homes. Housing values have plummeted. Headlines of lost jobs are almost daily. Sudden unemployment is knocking on the doors of fathers and mothers with young mouths to feed.

Companies are scrambling to keep solvent, as stocks tumble and opportunities dry up. Many reported near-devastating losses from 2008. Well-known businesses that have thrived for decades are suddenly laying off employees, reporting losses and, in some cases, staring down the barrel of fatal bankruptcy. Icons of Western culture, thought to always exist, may soon be reduced to relics of history.

Financial institutions are caving in. Having already sought funds from their governments, many are

via A New World Order

Unbelievably the Net is so entrenched in our modern life that warfare can actually be carried out by Computer! -And, Nations are piling resources resources into this type of disablement.  The targets are Nations infrastructure, and it seems has already been used by the US in Iraq.

“To go to physical war requires billions of dollars,” he said. “To go to cyber war most people can easily find the resources that could be used in these kind of attacks.” -Mr Day

May be my watch may someday self explode!-but as the theatre of war grows, devices could be planted in the most unlikely places such as the ‘bomb in a computer’ type scenario often seen on film such as Bond etc  though the main threat is reconnaissance and infrastructure………..

BRASILIA (AFP) – Brazil’s government vowed Wednesday to find what caused a massive and mysterious blackout that plunged half the country into the dark and raised questions over its preparedness to host the 2016 Olympics.

Did you see 60 Minutes last night? The first story was about how vulnerable our government’s computer systems are and our utility companies and our banks. All these have been hacked into or otherwise compromised. “Otherwise” being electronic components that were installed had been embedded with code that could allow them to be controlled by someone outside the system. (Brazil has already had their power grid shut down a few times in a few different places.)

Who does this? Foreign governments and organized crime groups. During the interview, Jim Lewis, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Steve Kroft that we do the same thing. We get into the systems of other countries.  Mr. Lewis sounded sort of proud as he said “we are really good” – the “top of the league”! Oh? The US has the best hackers on the planet? Then Mr. Lewis said when Russia and China asks how we can complain about them getting into our stuff when we get into theirs, he said it was worse for them to get into our systems.  Mr. Lewis said we depend on the internet more than other countries and it is woven into our economy and military in ways that other countries haven’t done. I turned to my son who was watching this with me and said, “Look at that guy polish his halo!”  As he continued to justify and explain it dawned on me that this is Spy vs. Spy (with a nod to Mad Magazine) and this stuff has gone on probably ever since there were at least two different government entities. Unfortunately, it will continue to go on til the end of this age. This sort of thing started off with no technology – just humans getting into other humans’ government and military business for the purpose of gathering information, then it just advanced as technology advanced.  I suppose it would have moved on to interception of communications when it was just letters being carried from one person to another to use of binoculars and listening devices and wire-tapping and so on. It would be interesting to read a good book on the history of spying. The internet is just the latest technology.

As far as our power grid, Ret. Admiral Mike McConnell, who is the former director of National Intelligence, said he “would be shocked” if our power grid has not been infiltrated. He said it could be gotten into in a way that could start in one place and spread. All anyone would have to do is cause a generator to self-destruct. I think it’s nuts that those generators can’t be readily replaced. They used to be made here in this country but not anymore. Did you know they have to be ordered from overseas and it takes 3 to 4 months to get the new one? Have you ever lived without electricity? I have for a few days after a hurricane and it’s different. I’m glad I have a gas stove so I can cook and my water is also heated by gas. I have a clothesline but would have to do laundry by hand. Gas can not be pumped without electricity. Many jobs could not be carried out without electricity. I supposed retail stores would figure it out but how would food be trucked in? Would there be tanker trucks that would normally deliver gas to the gas stations parked on parking lots and selling fuel right out of the truck? That was done after one of our hurricanes. (Can’t remember which one – they all start to run together after a few of them blow through.) What really concerns me is folks in hospitals and people who have to have kidney dialysis (like a relative of mine). What would they do without electricity? Would they have to go to another part of the country to get the treatment they need? Well, I guess this is what modern warfare would be. While we wonder about ‘dirty bombs’ and missiles, our water supply could be contaminated or, our power grid or banking system could be wiped out. Yeah, someone could wipe out the records at the banks. Wouldn’t that be a mess?

But as serious as all this is, I am not so scared of the enemies of this country as I am of my own government. I’ve told as much to my senators and congressman, too. I live near ports and refineries and this would be just the place to hit if someone wanted to mess with us. I remember hearing that we were a target when we had the Cuban Missile Crisis and I was only about 6 years old. What has always concerned me more was that our government would compromise my freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, religious freedom and privacy, in a misguided effort to keep me ’safe’. From whom? From a take-over by another country who would take away my freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, religious freedom and privacy? They have always played their spy games. But don’t go overboard and chase after US citizens. I’m just a homemaker down here in the armpit of Texas and I want to be left alone.

Welcome to The Art of Cyber War Blog.

We will be discussing Sun-Tzu’s “The Art of War”, and how it applies to Cyber-Warfare and Cyber-Security in general.

Take your armor off, and put down your weapons. We have much to discuss.