We don’t want the smoking gun to be a 404 message. Recently the White House and Pentagon have kicked their program to terrorize sow fear into the general population with the threat of “cyberterrorism” into high gear. In fact, now the cyber threat is a bigger threat than actual terrorism. Some even insist that instead of allowing the phantoms to duel it out for budgetary relevance the nightmares can be synthesized to provide a great excuse for the government to attempt to control speech on the internet.

What’s the world’s biggest war profiteer to do if it already owns the federal government but is having trouble kicking around the local government of Montgomery County, Maryland, where it’s headquartered? Why, hire the state of Maryland to step in, of course.

The ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has responded to complaints about the perception that an episode of NOVA called “Rise of the Drones” received “additional funding” from Lockheed Martin, one of the biggest US military defense contractors in the United States.

Fifty-one years ago today, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his final, prescient warning about the rising power of the military industrial complex. More than half a century later, we find ourselves in a political system which has ignored Eisenhower’s sound advice as the influence of the war industry on our society reaches a crescendo. Nowhere is this “disastrous rise of misplaced power” more apparent than in the debate about the Pentagon budget taking place in Washington, D.C.

The war industry stood back with glee when it released a shoddy study that produced the sought-after deceptive headlines about defense spending, the magic sauce of job creation. There was no balance to these reports, and the War Industry should know, because they funded it!

On the first news day after the holiday weekend reporting on Lockheed Martin, WSJ reports that the US is moving towards making cyberattacks an act of war.

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.

“A detailed accounting of all of Lockheed Martin’s government contracts could fill several large volumes,” writes William Hartung, in his new book Prophets of War, a history of the nation’s largest defense contractor. “Suffice it to say that they are involved at one level or another in nearly everything the federal government does, from providing instruments of death and destruction to collecting taxes and recruiting spies.”

For those who have followed the defense industry for years, that statement is no revelation, but for the vast majority of the American public, the notion that the maker of the radar-evading F-22 Raptor aircraft has also been involved in sorting the mail is both surprising, and important.

Tomorrow and Wednesday, the WaPo will continue its series on the Intelligence Industrial Complex. It will describe the contractors in the BWI/Fort Meade area that contribute to the NSA’s surveillance programs. According to the DNI’s Director of Communications, that story will describe the contractors in the vicinity, but not say explicitly that those contractors clustered around Fort Meade are working for the NSA.

Nevertheless, an anonymous official–who sounds an awful lot like Acting Director of National Intelligence David Gompert did in his official statement–is already out bitching about the contractor database the WaPo published as part of this series.