A widely-known (or at least widely-believed) “open secret” became a little less secret recently, as the CIA declassified a 1974 report pretty much affirming Israel as a nuclear power. Not surprisingly, this isn’t seen as particularly newsworthy, and most of the attention seems to be surrounding the remarkably coincidental timing of the document’s release. Still, it’s (probably) the closest we’re going to get to official acknowledgment of Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons anytime soon…

Not just any thirty-thousand people are soon to find themselves committed to defensive (and offensive) military operations in cyberspace - rather, it’s thirty-thousand members of the Air Force, all part of a minty-fresh new program called “Afcyber” (or, more likely, “AFCyber”.) While the numbers sound impressive, their intended operations sound like so much more of the same.

What’s most worrying to me is the increasing willingness to militarize the internet, and to (ab)use it for military purposes. I guess the whole flaw with shared property - that everyone wants to use it, but nobody has an incentive to protect or maintain it - applies to the internet. The internet, at least in this country, qualifies as critical infrastructure, so you’d think we’d be completely committed to protecting it, not trying to exploit it as a weapon, and damn the consequences…