Our Internet

The U.S. Army invented the Internet.
The Internet has such power and complexity that most hackers won't ever understand it the way our
government does.
Edward Snowden can't tell you that; and Army engineers won't tell you that.
I remember an east coast engineering school dean telling our group of parents in 1992 that the
computer engineering half-life was maybe three to four years. In some areas it could have been five.
So if a student took five years in '92 to get a degree in engineering, all the student learned in year one
would already be obsolete by that student's graduation date.
Wasn't '92 over twenty years ago?
How much more sophisticated is our Army technology today?
Most of us can't even guess.
Lay persons don't know how to measure mounds and mounds of data. We cannot give a precise or
even average number to an Army engineer's conceptualization of  'mounds'.
Non engineers don't know how many strokes are in a 'mound', or how big a 'mound' really could be.
We aren't going to know, whether we like it or not. If we come close to knowing, technology will
change almost instantaneously.
We can train hackers without allowing them to hack. That is the most power we are ever going to
have over the Internet invented by the U.S.Army. Hacking is dangerous; so should be reserved for
acts of practice on systems which may mimic the best designed ones professionals can construct.
We can go back even further than '92.
I was a teller in 1970 when we put stacks of checking account deposit slips on tables in the bank lobby.
In those days, our machines read bar codes on the deposit slips as real, important, permanently affirmed information.
Someone who was conversant in computer science removed all the "blank" bar coded deposit slips
from lobby tables in several of our city banks.
They replaced these lobby slips with seemingly identical ones; however, the replacement slips had the bar codes of the usurper's account.
Every person who deposited anything with the use of a lobby deposit slip that day, deposited to the
fraudulent account. As soon as the deposit was recorded, the trail and memory of the transaction had
been programmed  by the thieves to be erased- immediately upon the acceptance of the money by the receiver account.
Early the next morning, whoever opened the account with phony I.D. for strangers to enrich, used that same I.D. he or she had forged, in order to withdraw every penny of said money.
Banks changed the way they accepted and tracked deposits then, and how their machines read deposit
slips... after the fact.
Our government accesses the FISA courts to get information in an attempt to be somewhat transparent.
How would any of us know what level of transparency would be safe?
Why would any of us listen to one word of Snowden's delusions?
Our government has a difficult time making sure certain foreign governments don't hack our personal, sensitive information-  as well as our governmental classified, departmental, and administrative information.
Governments friendly to the U.S. would still enjoy having a leg up on us.
We don't have enough information about any of that to judge how our government must operate to
keep our info safe from real hackers, foreign and domestic.
Unfriendly governments would stop at nothing to bring down our infrastructures if they
could.
Then there are governments who aren't unfriendly, but would quickly become so if they could get the
upper hand over the U.S.
Citizens in this country don't ask themselves what part II would have been on 9-11.
Once the Pentagon, the White House, the Twin Towers and Wall Street were a rubble, what was the
plan for the good old U.S.of A.?
Who in this country knows how far our government has to go to protect us from the rubble some
would like us to call home?
Those who know the answer to that question could be the ones leaking the names and numbers of
the people we need for those answers. But wouldn't that put those people in danger?
I am certain the U.S. Government can get nearly unlimited info whenever they need it, erasing any
trace they had gotten it, or stored it, with probably a single stroke on the right computer.
There are foreign entities in this world, even some Americans, apparently, who would stop at absolutely nothing to see this whole nation go up in smoke.
And maybe we've been safe so long since 9-11, that we don't even have time to know what it takes
to make certain such horrors couldn't happen again.
We can make no mistake about it though; as determined as "some" are to see us powerless, our
officials themselves will stop at absolutely nothing aside, perhaps, from mass murder, to make certain this country doesn't become vulnerable to a possible Armageddon again.
The U.S. has the will, and the power to use methods we are not going to know much about, and they
can modify them on a dime.
We can still keep whining. That's what we can do. Waa- waa-waa...that and of course,once again, train hackers who don't hack.
We may need hacker capabilities, but not so much, hacker actualities.