A few weeks ago, I received a book from a person who, like the character Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, must not be named. The book was Cyber Wars, and it was written by Richard Clarke, former White House National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter Terrorism, with help from Robert Knake, an international affairs fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations.

Within its pages, Clarke explains the dark side of the increasingly flat world created by the global spread of the Internet. The problem is security. The very openness of the Internet, and the fact that no one really is in charge, means that no one anywhere on earth has the authority to think through and apply the kinds of security measures that could protect our nation, or other nations for that matter, from the threat of well-thought-out, well-planned and well-executed attacks on their cyber infrastructure.

Ironically, the country that invented the Internet, t