Why can't our government recruit bots from willing Americans to be ready to wage our own cyber war? Remember how you could enlist your computer to harness distributed computing power to help analyze SETI data with the SETI-AT-home project?
And how the jihadis tried this idea and failed.
Apparently, some are bouncing around the idea to give the government the legal authorization to seize CPUs in wartime for military botnets to wage cyber war:
Military users of botnets are very quiet about their work, because turning a PC into a zombie, without the permission of the user, is a crime. There has been some quiet talk, in democracies, of passing laws allowing the military to infect lots of computers, and form botherds, in the event of a national emergency. Police states, like China, don't worry so much about laws. Intelligence agencies are developing contacts in the Internet criminal underground, to make arrangements for renting existing botnets in wartime.
I'd still like to try the volunteer route. Though I admit that if only poor Windows 95 computers with few options in the civilian workplace dominate such a volunteer silicon miltia, I'd be willing to consider a draft to make sure that even Macs go to war.
