"Maybe sixth months ago, no more. It's simply not possible that it was eleven (going on twelve) months since 9/11."

This year has gone past rather quickly.  I'm a former New Yorker (actually lived there from 1994-1995, and grew up in CT, so I get to claim bridge and tunnel status at the very least), and was back in the city the week before the attacks for a friends wedding.  I took some friends of mine, who'd never been to New York, to the World Trade Center.  The 1993 bombing came up while we were sitting in the plaza between the towers, and one of my friends surmised "What were they thinking, you couldn't knock these things down.  Well, maybe with a plane or something".  Needless to say, a week later, back in Colorado, he called me right after everything happened and was a bit weirded out. 

Lucky for me, I get to fly back to NYC for a business meeting from 9/9-9/11.  I'll be flying home on the 12th.  I'm not sure how I feel about this, but, as a commentator on NPR pointed out today, I'm statistically more likely to be killed by a head kick from a donkey than a terrorist attack, so I'll just stay away from the Central Park Zoo.

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On Monday the National Infrastructure Protection Center warned: "wide-scale hacker attacks against U.S. websites and Internet Service Providers (ISP) are being planned for later tonight, possibly emanating from Western Europe." 

Given the NIPC's past record of incompetence, no one paid the warning much mind:

"The NIPC and Richard Clarke do have an excellent track record of warning about cyberattacks and cyber-badness that is often only visible to them," Smith said."

The attacks never materialized, at least not in any manner that was noticed:

Perhaps there may have been a brief rise in Internet traffic early Tuesday morning -- but it was a mere blip on the screen if anything, security experts said. But the general consensus is that Monday's alert was a self-created crisis caused by an over-reactive, publicity-seeking government agency, sparked by the idle online conversations of a band of young and aspiring "hackers" who had threatened to attack U.S. sites in retaliation for the Aug. 1 arrest of 14 Italian hackers in Milan.

The NIPC seem to have based their warning on the some talk in Italian hacker chat rooms about hitting US web sites in retaliation for the arrest of 14 Italian hackers based on tips from the US government.

"There was some talk on Italian Internet chat channels about DOSing and defacing American websites last week in response to the Milano arrests," Augustine DelFalco, a security consultant based in Rome, said. "But to me it was apparent that the conversations were being conducted by young teenagers. It's odd that such nonsense should concern your government."

In fact, George Smith of vMyths, a frequent critic of the NIPC, theorizes that the warning may very well have precipitated the attacks:

"Knowing the average cyber-ankle-biter, people known to stay up at odd hours, it's not at all unreasonable to entertain the idea that the NIPC alert might have precipitated some nincompoops who had nothing better to do with their time except create a statistical blip in someone's Internet monitoring service," Smith said.

Why are we paying for this?  Couldn't the money be better spent on something else?