Check It Out on the second Wednesday of the month has the following:

Frida Berrigan at Tomgram writes about a cybermilitary-industrial complex forming: cyberscares regarding cyberwars equal cybermoney. 

"As early as 2005, the Air Force saw the light on this one, and losing ground to the Army, Navy, and Marines in the boom-times of the Global War on Terror, began moving into cyberspace. It's never stopped. As Lewis Page, a defense correspondent for the Register, a British online tech magazine, points out: "The Air Force's traditional business of operating expensive manned aircraft has been somewhat undercut of late by the proliferation of much cheaper flying robots often operated by the Army, Navy or Marines."

"In the fight for the future cyberbudget, then, the Air Force's enemies "are not so much terrorists or sinister foreign powers as the other U.S. Armed Services," writes Page. With new relevance, of course, come new funds. As a start, when the Air Force sent its $143.8 billion budget request for fiscal year 2009 to Congress, it tacked on a list of as yet unfunded budget requirements, including nearly $400 million for cyber-related equipment and activities.

"The Navy is now in on the game, too. It naturally established a Naval Cyber Forces Command because, as it likes to say, "cyberspace has become the global battlespace." According to Government Executive, the Navy plans to appoint a three-star Vice Admiral to head its new cybercommand, outranking the Air Force's top cyber flyboy.

"Not to be outdone, the Army has set up its own cyberoutpost: the Network Warfare Battalion. Its 2009 Posture Statement asserts that its troops are "executing cyberspace operations" against "a significant and growing cyberthreat" and concludes that, in order to "maintain our dominance in cyberspace, the Army will continue to grow our abilities to better defend our own networks and have capabilities in place to conduct network warfare against adversary networks."

"The initial loser in the great cyberbattle appears to be the Department of Homeland Security, that bureaucracy for our old fears. Established in the wake of September 11, 2001, it quickly became a Frankenstein-like mess of more than 22 agencies, on which the Bush administration also downloaded responsibility for cyberoperations. Now, however, it is getting consistently low marks for cybersecurity from places like CSIS and the Government Accountability Office. "Oversight for cybersecurity must move elsewhere," is what James Lewis, senior fellow at CSIS, told Congress.

"The true beneficiaries of the military's cyberturf war are sure to be the major Pentagon contractors that have been positioning themselves to absorb Washington's new cyberdollars just as they have absorbed war dollars, terror dollars, and homeland-security dollars. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics have already launched a frenzy of buying in the area, gobbling up smaller tech companies and courting cyberinnovators. In 2007, for instance, Northrop Grumman purchased the Essex Corporation, a cybertech company, which CEO Ronald Sugar says has "grown significantly" since then.

"Military contractors have also been taking on hordes of "cyberninjas" to learn more about hackers. These young laborers have landed in one of the few sectors of the economy hiring these days.

"Is the United States really in a hypercrisis that warrants putting the word cyber in front of everything and multibillions more in the pockets of military-industrial corporations?

"If you listen to official Washington today, the answer is a resounding yes. But is the real threat any more insidious than malware and botnets? Is it really life and system threatening? Is it where we really want to invest our money?

"Without a doubt, cybercrime -- and even cyberterrorism -- pose actual dangers. But listening to all the scare-talk about cyberwar, we tend to forget that the most gruesome wars today are being fought with machetes, AK-47s, and crude improvised explosive devices fashioned out of repurposed walkie-talkies. The fact is that some of the most devastating wars of the future will be fought over food, water, and land, not to speak of religion, and those engaged in their brutal, messy battles will probably never log on to a computer or download a file.

"The story of how politicians, the Pentagon, and contractors conspire to inflame our fears with well-hyped threats of future cataclysm and then offer high-tech, highly bureaucratic, unbelievably expensive solutions that result in lots of weapons contracts, lots of corporate/military conferences, a few blue-ribbon studies, but no significant threat reduction is really the story of our time."

Johann Hari at The Independent on the three ticking time bombs under British politics.

"The reasons why the Brown stuff has hit the fan have to be understood properly. The attempts to take Brown down have come almost exclusively from the Blairite wing of the Labour Party – people like Stephen Byers, Hazel Blears and Charles Clarke. They have always thought Brown was too left-wing, and now grasp for his few tiny millimetre-shuffles towards social democracy as explanation for his failure.

"But this is surreal. Gordon Brown has failed because he has been paralysed, unable to take any substantial decisions at all – except to keep drifting in a Blairite direction. With the honourable exception of using the state to stop the banks collapsing, he has carried on with hardline Blairism: building more airports, trying to part-privatise the Post Office, and apologising profusely to millionaires for his meagre tax rise, even though 68 per cent of the public support it.

"In reality, he has failed because of a double-whammy: he has continued with lousy and unpopular right-wing policies, and he sells them appallingly. If he remains as Labour leader, he will hand the country to David Cameron, who will dismantle the few good left-wing policies that snuck through New Labour – tax credits, SureStart, Educational Maintenance Allowances.

"The second bomb came crashing in from the extreme right – the BNP – whic now has two MEPs, both with records of extreme bigotry. Nick Griffin has bragged about how much he learned from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, while as a young man Andrew Brons joined the National Socialist Movement, set up on Hitler's birthday as a tribute to him.

"But it is not the case that 10 per cent of people in Yorkshire are sympathetic to Holocaust-denying lunatics. No: they were overwhelmingly skint young white men who would, a generation ago, have formed the Labour core vote. They are angry about low wages and chronic shortage of housing – and simply telling them they are bigots won't get us very far.

"The third bomb is the rising rejection of the European Union. We have now reached a point where Britain's governing party has been beaten by an organisation whose sole purpose is to yank us out of the EU. This undercurrent is tugging at the entire political system: the Tories in the European Parliament are now withdrawing from their alliance with Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and the rest of the European centre-right, and cobbling together a coalition of Polish gay-bashers, Czech global warming deniers, and assorted Europe-hating loons to sit with. Cameron's Tories would form the most anti-European government in living memory: they even voted against European co-operation to track down child molesters.

"How long can we spit at the 450-million-strong trading block on our borders, with which we do 60 percent of our business, before it has consequences? How long can we try to kick out the foundations of unprecedented peace in Europe before it begins to crack?"