Interesting article about what to do when traditional Internet security measures fail:

The Internet today is in the same position as New Orleans was before the hurricane, a heavily fortified resource of incalculable economic and cultural value whose protections will one day inevitably fail.
— What will you do when the cyber-levee breaks? Opinion by Bruce Levinson, ComputerWorld, SEPTEMBER 21, 2005

The article recommends distributed backups and diversified communication methods. It even recommends what it calls plenipotentiaries, i.e., someone in each office of a company who can act without checking with the home office. Those are good ideas. And I’m not sure why that last shouldn’t be more widely used; distributed agility should lead to more productivity in any case. And it’s been 200 years now since Admiral Horaio Nelson had his sailors trained so well that his orders before the battle of Trafalgar consisted of “England expects that every man will do his duty.”

Yet there’s something missing in the article’s recommendations. Continue reading →