Why “war”?
This is kind of an unfortunate prefix, in these rather twitchy times. Wardriving has nothing whatsoever to do with war. The term is the offspring of the term wardialing, which was the (now mostly extinct) practice of dialing random phone numbers via computer to see if you could find an answer modem. Wardialing, in turn, came out of the 1983 cult movie War Games, in which a teenager got himself (and the rest of the world) into serious trouble by creating an autodialer that eventually found its way into a DOD computer programmed to wage nuclear war. The kid was looking for computers supporting online games and had no strong intent to “break into” anything the problems that developed lay with an essentially undefended military computer. If I were the one coining a term, I’d coin something else, but the word is out there and we’re using it.
. We feel there are special circumstances about this war on terrorism that make it a situation that cannot be attacked in typical ways. Al Qaeda, for instance, is a highly organized operation. It relies on a 7,000-page guide on terrorism,3 and has cells throughout the world. Furthermore, it has many asset streams including, but not limited to, the sale of diamonds,4 drugs, and oil. It is an organization that has been trained by the CIA and the ISI (Pakistani Intelligence). Bin Laden alone has $300 million — he is not the same as a nation-state, but is an individual who has for a decade cultivated global terrorism with the single goal of creating a world under Islamic rule. Bombing and invading countries in which terrorist networks operate will merely strengthen the resolve of this opposition, and provide ammunition to the terrorists’ recruiting of the oppressed.
