1 July 2001
While the world's authorities are concaving in secret to devise means to protect their national and economic security, a single book will thwart whatever defenses are in place and likely to be set up in the near future: Security Engineering: A Guide to Dependable Distributed Systems, by Ross Anderson. See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
Why, it will be asked someday in a committee of inquiry, why was this book not classified at birth, OSA'd at Cheltenham, pulped Ft. Meade.
To execute the mythical digital Pearl Harbor, this book tells how. Get it before it is classified as dangerous munition.
Dr. Anderson, a distinguished scientist at Cambridge University, is presumably no terrorist of weapons of mass destruction, nor a deep black economic spy hiding in Echelon's shadow, but he has provided a perfect guide for cheating and beating the most sophisticated security systems now deployed for keeping the citizenry and their nations safe from harm.
Responsibly, Dr. Anderson provides recommendations for constructing truly secure systems, but if the past practices he bountifully ridicules are a guide to the present and future, he will be ignored by all except those whose golden arms aim to handsomely profit from willful neglect of security weaknesses.
Aspirant war criminals, intelligence nostalgics, rogue statists, drug kingpins, mafiosi, tax-avoiders, auto-authoritarians, all those too wise to slave for patriotism and pittance, will rejoice at Mr. Anderson's revelations of how to liberate military secrets, banking assets, masterpiece art, estate luxuries, classified files and intimate data, from just about any Vatican, any Buckingham, any White House, vaunting faith-clad assurance that "nobody can snatch these treasures, no way, impossible, trust us, Inshallah."
Just before you quit your job to practice Dr. Anderson's golden tips to breaking and entering intelligence archives, bypassing nuclear weapons locks, glomming chem-biological warfare secrets, apply his advice to use your firm's computer to clean out the offshore bank accounts of Boss's alimony avoidances, then go raid the slush funds of the world's secret services, French leaders not alone in being bribed for yum mum.