Fighting Terror in Cyberspace (Series in Machine Perception & Artifical Intelligence)

The Internet, or the ARPANET in its original name, was a remarkable idea. The Net was designed in the late 60's by US ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to connect distant computers to each other. This was a critical need at a time when each computer was a precious resource of computing power, which, if connected, could be shared among several groups of researchers at multiple physical sites. Like in many other engineering projects, the ARPANET designers could hardly foresee all future uses of their new infrastructure. Probably, the vision of Internet cafes and airport passengers checking email on their laptops was far beyond their imagination. The fact is that long before computers became affordable and 'lpersonal'l, a major part of the cyberspace traffic shifted from connecting computers engaged in some computationally intensive tasks to connecting the users of those computers - the people. Thus, a special ARPA survey has found in 1973 that as much as three-quarters of all net traffic was nothing more sophisticated than electronic email'. Disregarding what ARPA personnel could think or do about it, the cyberspace was moving on its own, hardly controllable way.