This is a charming time capsule from a more innocent age, when us geeks could chortle smugly at how clueless government security agencies were about technology.
Since then, with the advent of the likes of Stuxnet, the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance apartus, and the Great Firewall of China, we've been taught a hard lesson that governments are perfectly capable of developing technology expertise or contracting it out, if need be.
It's even a truism now that computer defence against a well funded nation state is hopeless. This was not the case back in the old Steve Jackson Games days, when it seemed that the entirety of computer power rested in the hands of a relatively small number of idealist academics.
Rember John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace?
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
What once sounded almost like prophecy has come to sound more like a sad, deluded joke.
Since then, with the advent of the likes of Stuxnet, the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance apartus, and the Great Firewall of China, we've been taught a hard lesson that governments are perfectly capable of developing technology expertise or contracting it out, if need be.
It's even a truism now that computer defence against a well funded nation state is hopeless. This was not the case back in the old Steve Jackson Games days, when it seemed that the entirety of computer power rested in the hands of a relatively small number of idealist academics.
Rember John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace?
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
What once sounded almost like prophecy has come to sound more like a sad, deluded joke.