To innate according Your considerations on web:
The Internet as a warfare medium has already been used in the American invasion in Iraq. At that time the US Army utilized the Internet only for very specific purposes and the main one was to assure a communication link between particular headquarters... or something. Eventually the bandwidth turned out to be the main problem: communication links were overloaded with tons of unnecessary information like redundant maps, coordinates and so on. So the Internet was rejected to be used as a medium for modern war actions. I guess it will be used in future because the Internet has a big potential in itself. It is available almost everywhere now, and the amount of different kind of devices even domestic ones, which are already accessible over the Internet, is increasing. This might be a great aim for modern or future terrorism. Hospitals, police departments, educational facilities all connected to the world wide network.
Of course the internal network (the Intranet) of important organizations like military ones will be well protected from public access or even completely inaccessible for common people. But all those organizations will also have a public access area networks which will be, by definition, vulnerable and exposed to a variety of modern viruses, trojans, hoaxes - you name it.
So the Internet is a playground for everyone - good and bad guys. This is what Lem depicts in "Bomba Megabitowa". And I agree with it. Nowadays we become more and more dependant on computers and global networks. Obviously this global communication is absolutely the greatest virtue of the Internet. But on the other hand we work on computers which are outfitted with bunch of security services like personal firewalls, spyware protection software, anti-viruses, and all this is because the Internet is filled with number of dangers and pitfalls. They were unknown in the past since the Internet was not that popular. I would say that today the Internet reflects the world that surrounds us with all its virtues and drawbacks - it's due to us - men. This conslusion is consintent with what Socrates has already stated.
Can WWW be used for propaganda? Of course it can and in fact it is! I'm not gonna list examples now, but I have a question to Socrates. Are there any limitations put on the Internet in China? I heard a lot about it from TV and some magazines.
CU
Deck