Anti-Aircraft:
The heightened alert, approved today by President Bush, came as the Pentagon loaded live anti-aircraft missiles into launchers around Washington for the first time in 40 years, and prompted the State Department to shutter more than a dozen embassies and consulates in Asia and elsewhere.
That’s kinda scary. I live just a few miles north of the beltway. The problem is that the next wave of terrorist attacks, whenever they happen, will have to make the plane hijackings look like childs play, just like the attacks last year made every previous terrorist attack look like a game. I’ve got a hint for ya: it’s not going to involve airplanes. It’s going to be so random that we wouldn’t fathom it, even in our current paranoid state.
It might happen tomorrow, it might happen years from now. Who knows? But it’ll be big. Nuclear? Chemical? Biological? Who knows. Catastrophic, yes. Other than that, we don’t know.
I’m sorry to go off on this tangent in such an obvious techblog, but I had to get it out. I will note that last year, The Washington Post and The BBC were the only two major news outlets that I could reliably access. I watched some of the world trade center stuff unfold on BBC tv over broadband at the school library. I was kicked out of the library before details emerged about what the heck was going on downtown surfaced, but many nontraditional places like slashdot, Scripting News and others.