John McAfee at businessinsider.com:
America’s cybersecurity is fragmented, inconsistent, and dysfunctional. Terrorist attacks occur as if they were lightning strikes — unpredictable and indefensible. Yet this is not true.
Mathematical models exist, using pattern recognition, point-set topology, and Boolean algebra, that can easily identify every terrorist cell on earth within minutes of the cell’s organization — providing that sufficient raw data is available.
In addition to identifying terrorist cells, these formulas could predict a nation’s troop movements, military plans, political moves, and nearly everything else — without having to read a single word of communication, parse a single sentence, or intercept a single message.
I’ll leave the explanation for later in the article.
I first want to ask a question. Why has no one asked why the Chinese have chosen their specific US targets for cybertheft? Doesn’t it seem odd, for example, that they wanted the personnel records of everyone who has worked for the US government for the past 50 years? They could just have easily, believe me, walked off with the top-secret plans for our next nuclear bomber, but they chose personnel records.
The 21 million records they took could not easily be used to monitor every person’s conversations, emails, and messages. As the NSA has discovered, the volume of such information is simply too large for any current means of analysis. When the standard practices of “disinformation,” which almost everyone now uses to some extent, is factored in, all of the supercomputers in the world combined could not handle it.
The Chinese are clearly doing something orders of magnitude more subtle and powerful than our own government’s covert agencies are doing.