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Like so much about our world, rapid, widespread connectivity of the last decade has sharpened these dangers. Connection changes the nature of an object; it can make it much more vulnerable. It can make the harmless dangerous. Generally, once a machine was jacked into a network, all sorts of fresh possibilities for mischief flowed right along with the data. The move from a lone PC on your desk to a really connected machine represented the difference between living in a small town and walking the streets of New York City. In one place you'd have few encounters, mostly familiar and harmless. In the other, you'd face an endless stream of the strange, the new and the unexpected. This is what life is like every day for your phone or your bank or military - a world of ceaseless assault, often from never-seen weapons. Robert Morris Sr., a cryptographic and security genius who towered over NSA code breaking programs for decades in the last century, compressed his lifetime of experience cracking machines into “Three Golden Rules of Computer Security”:133 Rule One: Do not own a computer. Rule Two: Do not power it on. Rule Three: Do not use it. He could have added a Fourth Rule: Do not connect it to anything. Of course, as we look around today, we're furiously, enthusiastically violating all four of these rules pretty much every moment. In fact, our whole economic and social dreamscape depends on breaking them. We want the best device, we want it always on, we want to use it all the time. Utility and connection are almost synonyms now. That the Warez Dudes, or their 215t century brethren, are hungry to exploit these systems offers us a chance to understand even more deeply just how power works in this network age. Why are they so desperate to get inside? How exactly do they do it? We’ve seen so far two important properties of life in the network age. First, the way in which network power exists on a sort of new surface of connected devices and cores, tied by strong data links that are slowly ripping power out of old institutions. Think of my Dad’s role as a doctor or the sharing economy shocks delivered by connected cars and bedrooms and labor, for instance. Second, we've seen how networks are complex adaptive systems, where emergent features -billion dollar businesses, terror organizations, drones - appear with an easy, destructive frequency that is wiping out old leaders and replacing them with new ones that better fit the demands of a connected age. Looking at the network world and seeing that mesh, seeing the emergence of fit new species and the impending extinction of others is the initial, essential part of the Seventh Sense. Lingering deep inside the systems themselves, there is another lesson, however. And, not surprisingly, it is most alive in the hackers. “Exploit engineers,” a team led by researcher Sergei Bratus has argued, “show you the unintended limits of your 133 Bob Morris cite to come 97 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018329