Joel Brenner is a former senior counsel at the National Security Agency, where he saw first-hand the wide taxonomy of computer issues related to crime, warfare and espionage. It's easy to get caught up in the romance of the social misfit hacker but the reality has moved beyond. Today it is nation states like China employing 30,000+ professionally trained computer scientists to steal state and corporate secrets from the United States to gain a competitive edge. The real danger is not an evil genius who holds the Internet hostage to a worm (though that may happen), but a steady transfer of wealth silently taking place each and every day on a massive scale and hardly anyone seems to notice or care. Brenner has thought deeply on these issues and gives many examples, it's fascinating but quickly becomes so difficult and scary as to be insolvable. He ends with policy recommendations. Hopefully people in positions of responsibility find this book and realize how serious and big the problem is, and how quickly it is exploding. Ever since 9/11 the world has been focused on "kinetic" terrorism - bombs mostly - but I suspect history will look back and see the 2000s more in light of computer security, the dark side of the computer revolution and Information Age is only beginning to come home to roost. ( )