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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Vosilla who wrote (9092)	2/28/2005 2:35:56 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

John, I have no doubt that such breaches and subsequent effects are possible, as you say, and in fact they are now being done piecemeal, if you prefer to view it in that way. I don't want to turn this into a political discussion, but briefly, what do you think about the use of the term terrorist, to the extent that it is being used these days? The word evokes images once reserved for other terms, such as: thieves; enemies of the state; military foes; hackers (the "because it was there" variety, at least); anarchists; begrudging ex US military personnel (a la Oklahoma City); deranged individuals and sociopaths, bed wetters with bad memories of their juvenile pasts; and zealots of numerous moral, religious and spiritual persuasions. What a crew, eh? The wholesale use of the term is annoying to me, at times, despite my subconsciously using it myself on occasion, before catching myself. It once was that if anything were misplaced or went awry in the home during the middle of the night it was easiest to blame the cat the next morning, and no one was ever the wiser as to the real forces that were at play the night before. Now we take the same license to blame the terrorists, instead, while there are waiting in the wings the eclectic list of other miscreants I enumerated above, patiently biding their time and plotting their next moves in a nearby cubicle or office space. The situation is similar to that which enterprises face assessing risks to institutional financial resources, knowledge bases and infrastructure, both from outside the firm and from within. But most breaches, as it turns out, are not committed by external forces, but committed by internal staff (or do we call those "terrorists," too?), instead. ;-) FAC