From FT Alphaville:
God complex *alert*
A couple of years ago we had the privilege of attending a closed door session with a well known (former) spook/security type. We shan’t mention exactly who it was, but suffice to say the person in question seemed to know more about what’s what in the world of global security than anyone else doing the public speaking rounds these days.
It was a so-called “access event”, the sort where wealth managers pay organisers to connect them with those who know much more about what’s going on than they do.
The spook in question made clear that he could only comment in a private capacity and in very general terms, but he was nevertheless open to questions.
The key point this spook seemed to want to make was that the next great security threat would come from a very unexpected source. What’s more, the nature of the threat would be entirely different to the sort we are usually accustomed to.
Most of the room did not pick up on this. The questions from the floor focused, obsessively, on old established threats: “How likely is Iran to strike? “, “What about China?!”, “What about the Islamic threat?”, “What about North Korea?” and so on.
While the spook answered these questions politely, whenever he tried to steer away from these points the room interpreted this as deflection. The crowd pressed on relentlessly with the wrong questions.
But he managed to make a central point: in his view the next great disruption would originate from a domestic source. He was effectively saying, ‘You guys in the audience are all barking up the wrong tree,’ stating specifically that if you are worried about threats to democratic capitalist society you should perhaps stop looking east and instead start looking west towards Silicon Valley.And it's not just the technology. She's recently covered the "equity as currency" angle which is currently keeping managements around the world awake dreaming up new takeover defenses, she's touched on the phase shift* advantage that some elites may already have acquired. Actually there's a small checklist of things that are, to coin a term, spooky.
From his standpoint, when it came to technology, the private sector had more than caught up with government geeks in so many areas (mostly because it can benefit from open source scaleability, while secretive government tech can’t)....MORE
And not in a tinfoil hat kind of way.
*Think horseraces. One horse may be slower than another by only a couple ticks of the stopwatch but because of the payout structure the winner will get three to ten times more prizemoney than number two.
Another example is the two hunters running from the bear--"I don't have to be faster than the bear, I just have to be faster than you!""
