[kwhitefoot]

It was an exaggeration.

But it is certainly not especially hard for _governments_ to take down the net in their own country and in many cases reduce the degree of interconnectedness with other countries so far as to effectively take down large chunks of the Internet. The problem is that we do not truly have a network, instead we have a tree structure connected to a very small number of fat pipes. As originally envisaged the internet would be resilient in the face of the failure of one route because there would be many alternative routes but that is not what we have today.

This is a much bigger threat than the cracking of individual machines.

[mentat]

Depends on what you think you're trying to protect against. Having foreign powers or foreign mafias in control of large parts of your infrastructure seems like a big threat.