Storing security holes for a rainy day
"The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled," wrote Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, who was known as "Lick" and is the man widely remembered as the internet's Johnny Appleseed. Mr. Licklider joined the Pentagon in 1962, and his ideas later formed the basis for the military's primordial internet work.
Even a big-vision idealist like Mr. Licklider could never have imagined that more than 50 years later, we would be telling the internet our deepest secrets and our whereabouts, and plugging in our smartphones, refrigerators, cars, oil pipelines, power grid and uranium centrifuges.
And even the early internet pioneers at the Pentagon could not have foreseen that half a century later, the billions of mistakes made along the way to creating the internet of today and all the things attached to it would be strung together to form the stage for modern warfare.
It is rare to find a computer today that is not linked to another, that is not baked with circuitry, applications and operating systems and that has not -- at one point or another -- been probed by a hacker, digital criminal or nation looking for weaknesses to exploit for profit, espionage or destruction.