As Al-CIA-da become the "good guys" (again), and I-CIA-SIS starts to crumble, and the latest boogeymen fail to strike a chord of panic in a boogeyman-weary public (remember the fearsome Khorasan Group, anyone?), it is safe to say that the old Global War on Terror (GWoT) paradigm is falling by the wayside. Lucky for the multi-trillion-dollar global terror-industrial complex, then, that the spiffy new _cyber_terror paradigm is waiting in the wings to take its place!

But just as the fading GWoT paradigm requires a steady stream of (perceived) threats in order to justify the bloated budgets of the US intelligence and security apparatus, so, too, does this new cyberterror paradigm require a constant flow of (perceived) online threats to justify the bloated budgets of the US cybersecurity forces. And just as in the GWoT, every "failure" of cyber-intelligence and every "inadvertent" proliferation of cyber-weaponry gives the newly-created US Cyber Command an excuse to expand its role and take even bolder action in its quest to "fight the net."

The GWoT and all of its attendant ills have been built on the back of that "catalyzing event"— our "new Pearl Harbor," 9/11. So, naturally, the new cybersecurity establishment is waiting breathlessly for the "cyber 9/11" that will justify the complete crackdown and government takeover of the internet.

Unsurprisingly, the "cyber 9/11" meme stretches back almost to 9/11 itself. Back in 2003, even as the Pentagon was feverishly drafting its plans to "fight the net" as if it were "an enemy weapons system," Mike McConnell, the ex-director of the National Security Agency (NSA), was fearmongering over the possibility of a cyber attack "equivalent to the attack on the World Trade Center" if a new institution were not created to oversee cybersecurity. Since then, report after report has continued to use the horror of 9/11 as a way of fueling public hysteria over cyberterrorism.

Of course, many of you reading this editorial will already know the reason for the cyberterror frenzy: There is a pre-planned solution waiting in the wings to be revealed to the public after they have been prompted to respond to the next (virtual) false flag provocation. We don't have to speculate on this point. In 2008, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig told a technology conference that a cyber equivalent of the Constitution-destroying Patriot Act is on the shelf, ready to be rubber stamped into law. All it requires is a "cyber 9/11" to make such legislation politically viable.