February 17, 2000 – Bill Clinton emerged from this week's Internet security summit full of assurances that all is safe and sound in the world of e-commerce, but the recent high-profile Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on Yahoo!, Ebay, and CNN serve to illustrate the obvious point that the streets of cyber-city are not as safe as Big Brother wants you to think.

The future of digitized commerce depends on you making the laughable assumption that you're the only one who reads your e-mail, and that the little lock icon in the corner of your browser means everything is "secure." But, considering that the FBI has few leads in the DoS case and there's still a Russian hacker cruising electronic shopping malls with a few thousand credit cards lifted from CDNow's "secure" website, the notion of security on the Internet is becoming about as easy to sell as real estate in Chechnya.

Case in point: after extensive research by federal investigators and corporate security experts, the FBI has uncovered little hard information about the culprits who instigated last week's blitzkrieg. They have determined only that a number of computers in California, Oregon, and Canada were used as staging, or "zombie," machines to launch assaults and that they implemented a widely available application called Tribal Flood Network. The attacks crippled a number of commercial mega-sites for a few hours by flooding them with more data requests then they could accommodate.

Currently, federal agents are seeking to question a pair of hackers known as "coolio" and "mafiaboy," but maintain that they are not suspects. Considering that over 60 people worldwide have either claimed responsibility for the attacks, or say they know who did it, the federal DoS case is looking about as thin as Kate Moss on a juice diet.

Compounding matters is the fact that over the weekend hackers infiltrated the website of RSA Security Inc., which claims to have developed an effective countermeasure against future DoS attacks and bills itself as "the most trusted name in e-security." The revised home page mocked RSA for claiming to have solved the DoS problem and taunted that, "the most trusted name in e-security has been owned." Of course, the press joined RSA in downplaying the incident.

Ironically, in an email statement sent to the White House the day of the I-security summit, CNN News admitted that someone had bypassed filters for an online chat with the President the day before. In response to a question about Clinton's thoughts on cyber-space, the hacked-in presidential impostor replied, "Personally, I'd like to see more porn on the Internet, Wolf, how about you?"

Tallied up in the past seven days the cyber-score is something like Hackers:10, Feds: zip.

Somehow Clinton managed to look the cameras dead in the eye after his security summit and say: "These attacks are a source of concern, but I don't think we should have a vast sense of insecurity about them.'' Then, of course, this is the same guy who tried to convince us that he never inhaled and that Monica was just bringing him pizza.

In my book, whether they're 17-year-old socially inept geeks, or 30-something cybernetic brain surgeons, hackers should be held with some degree of esteem. I say this, not just because they get to use hip mysterious pseudonyms like "coolio" and "mafiaboy," but because they do us an immeasurable service by undermining the false sense of security the corporate sponsored government tries so hard to instill in all things "connected."

The fact of the matter is that in virtual reality – as in physical reality – things are often not what they seem and little is beyond the reach of a skilled person who wants it bad enough. Really, in spite of adamant assertions to the contrary, you are almost always being watched, and no one is in control.

It is worth noting that, in an arrangement not unlike prohibition-era Chicago, hacker subculture is populated by a number of the very same security experts who cash in on our need to be protected. Many hackers, including "mixter," the programmer who created the software used in the DoS attacks, consider themselves good guys known as "white-hats" whose mission it is to save the Internet by perforating its veneer of security.

As I said, in some ways this approach is laudable because it reminds us that we're all one massive quake away from uncontrolled chaos, but, call me a conspiracy theorist, I don't think it's an accident that the sales of e-security products and stocks have shot up by more than 50-percent in the last week.

On the flip side of this double-edged digital sword is the increasingly blunt blade of privacy. As the war on drugs clearly shows, the media machine is quite adept at convincing citizens they need to give up little things like privacy in exchange for a sense of security. As the fear of hack-attacks and cyber-terrorism grows, an amazingly large number of people will submit to heightened surveillance and unprecedented invasions of privacy in exchange for the feeling that Big Brother is keeping things safe.

What further twists this bizarre Orwellian saga is that hackers are probably the least of your surfing worries. While the entire hyped-up media-driven world is getting its electronic undies in a tight-wad over the temporary outage of a few websites, a number of other multi-million dollar companies are quietly putting together dossiers on you and your entire family.

The popular press barely yawned when a software consultant recently discovered that RealNetwork's software package, RealJukebox, routinely gathers information from your hard drive, including your name, and clandestinely sends it back to the company; and DoubleClick recently purchased direct-marketing company, Abacus, in a move that allows them to merge their "anonymous" on-line "profiling" system – which tracks 80-million Internet users a month through banner ads – with the Abacus database – which tracks the real names, addresses, and catalog purchases of over 88-million households.

The combination of these developments makes me wonder what Clinton really meant when he assured us everything would be all right if we "just work together."

Either way, next time you log on, just remember what my grandpappy used to say: "Just because they say you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not watching you."