Everything changed on September 11, 2001. It’s become an American truism. And for many, it’s also absolutely true. It certainly was the case for Tom Engelhardt. He was roughly seven miles north of the World Trade Center that morning and that’s about the furthest he’s been from it since.

As it turned out, Carmageddon was light on both the car and the “mageddon.” The 405 Freeway even reopened early. That’s what happens when federal, state and local government works together to solve a problem! For me, it was just another Southern California weekend. For the rest of the world…

Within the context of the Defense Authorization, a few points of the Department of Defense’s campaign to describe what they believe their cyberwar policy to be stick out. First, it envisions preparatory actions–basically spying on a presumably non-belligerent adversary’s infrastructure to map out how DOD would launch a cyberattack if the time came.

How many times have we faced this stage already? How many times over could we have prosecuted KSM already if we had just used existing, rather than Kangaroo, courts? How many more years will it take to determine whether KSM can plead guilty so as to martyr himself?

Lockheed may have prevented a much bigger breach into their own systems. But the assumption of many is that other companies might not have noticed what Lockheed did.

No wonder the US Army was allegedly bested in the WikiLeaks leak by a Lady Gaga CD.

The mission was launched on a less than optimal night. And it was launched when it was because the Administration worried about impending leaks.

It’s becoming an obsession for me, this disinterest in fixing gaping holes in our network security even as the Administration claims Bradley Manning’s alleged leak could be a capital offense. If this stuff is so damned secret, plug the fucking holes!

This narrative still seems to be missing at least one step: how they learned Abu Ahmed’s real name.

After pausing for a day to placate another bleating billionaire, President Obama stepped to the first microphone Thursday to announce that Leon Panetta would soon sit where Bob Gates now sits, and that David Patraeus would sit in Panetta’s old chair, and that John Allen would grab King David’s throne, and so on and so forth until someone pulled the needle off the record. At which point we were told that the president had re-tooled his national security team for the challenges that lie ahead.

But if that sounds less like re-tooling and more like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, well, that’s because it should.