Consider the idea of war, what is it? Clausewitz said it was the “continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means”. What he meant was when political intercourse and diplomacy broke down war was the tool used to resolve the political argument. Think about that. What would be the threshold that would differentiate continued political intercourse from the failure of political intercourse that precipitates war in cyberspace?

To expand on this consider the recent Iranian ‘cyberwar’. This cyberwar was described by most commentators as consisting of Iranians using new technologies to communicate about their efforts at resisting a discredited election. A related component of this cyberwar was people outside of Iran attempting to help Iranians with their communications. This meets the Clauzewitzian threshold for continuation of political intercourse but what was it in reality? It was free speech. And the political power could legitimately claim to be fighting a cyberwar by suppressing their political opponents freedom of speech.

Without a very well defined and salient description of what cyberwar is the instantiation of a military function to protect us from it is inherently dangerous. Most ‘cyberwar’ bears no resemblance to war of any kind. It is crime. It is speech. It is abuse. But it does not require a military response, it requires something else entirely.

I realize that this won’t stop a lot of virus’s but it could, in the aggregate, have an impact on a lot of other kinds of mayhem.

Anyway, I’m not sure if I made myself clear that way.

In my apartment, which is kind of an extended stay place, so I take what they give me, I have a wire coming out of the wall. To acheive the same effect I have to plug in and plug out the wire.

What I’d rather have is a mechanical switch like the wireless button I have for disconnecting and connecting myself to the internet on the fly.

In fact, the web browsers we have should have a setting that allows the machine to do that automatically.

I’m off the net, until I click on something, then it bursts onto the net to retrieve data, when it’s done it electro-mechanically switches me off the network until I make another request.

If I want full time, always on the net, I should have a setting for that too.

This all leads towards a more intelligent browser.

Another visionary of the pre war years was Fuller, but the
US, UK, France , etc ignored his ideas while Germany didn’t,
which lead to the ‘Blitzkrieg’

Just imagine a volunteer USA Botnet.