chaotic thoughts
The word that security experts use to describe simple threats to complicated systems is asymmetry. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his essay "The Great Asymmetry," catastrophe is favored by nature. Species diversity increases for millennia, and then an asteroid extinguishes many forms of life; a skyscraper that takes years to build can be destroyed in an hour. The wreck of a city by a hurricane is an example of asymmetry. So is terrorism - the relative ease of destruction is the edge terrorists use to compensate for their small numbers.
» Reinventing 911 on Wired
What I wrote earlier.
Asymmetry - yes. How much easier it is to create chaos than order. And opening up systems like this civilian emergency network to public scrutiny is the only rational course of action. Because no chaos can be anticipated and planned for fully - a million eyes examining an ordered system will never even come close to approximating the infinitude of chaos potential. "The key is not to anticipate every problem, but to create flexible networks that can route around failure." And this is why Google works; why Linux is so powerful; why open source rocks your ass; why the fundamental feature of successful evolution is adaptability and well-adjustedness.
We're constantly ordering chaos, but order is so fragile in comparison to natural states of disorder: think, for example, of a carefully-stacked pyramid of tins in the supermarket. No ordered, inert system can sustain indefinitely. But when a system is self-vigilant, self-aware, and adaptable enough to order itself intelligently - chaos potential will flag. And incidentally, this is the difference between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. Because this goes for systems in general: emergency communications systems, the Internet, desk-planners, databases...
...and human consciousness. Oh yes.