Future 1: cyber war
"the world's dominant internet company is now in the crossfire of early skirmishes of the next cold war.
This thought was reinforced by Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. He'd been to the International Institute for Strategic Studies for a briefing on its annual survey, Military Balance. 'The thing I found most interesting,' he said, 'was the confirmation that cyber-security is the hot issue … John Chipman, the head of the IISS, says the institute is about to launch a study of cyber-security which raises all sorts of issues. What if a country's infrastructure could be destroyed as effectively by a cyber-attack as by an invasion of tanks? How do you defend against that? How do you identify the culprits? What does international law have to say – might we have to revise our definitions of what constitutes an act of war?
'Chipman argues, plausibly, that we are now at an equivalent period to the early 1950s. Just as strategists had to devise whole new doctrines to cope with the nuclear age, so they will have to come up with new ideas to cope with the information age.'"
