"God, we’ve been resilient," says Patrick Gray, the director of the Internet Security Systems’ X-Force National Emergency Response, "but the ugliness is lurking. We’re reaching our limit with the angst. Popeye once said, ’I’ve had alls I can stands and I can’t stands no more.’ We’re reaching that point."

And when we do, everything will fall apart. And then, and only then, will it begin to get better.

Scenario Two Welcome To The Lockdown

If innovation and privacy have to be sacrificed for the sake of security, so be it

After the digital Pearl Harbor, one simple truth will become apparent to everyone: The surest and fastest way to avoid another one, to save lives and to make the world’s computer systems secure, is to lock them up, freeze them in a permanent status quo. Put functions into chips that not only won’t integrate with other applications but can’t. Extensibility in 2010 is a liability, not a feature.

"That [scenario] is appealing because it’s one of the simplest things you can do with computers: restrict their abilities," says Peter Tippett, CTO of security vendor TruSecure and noted security expert.

Tippett can’t bear to imagine such a world. But Software Engineering Institute fellow Watts Humphrey has resigned himself to it. "If we force security restrictions, we’ll dry up a lot of innovation," he says. "That’s a cycle we’re likely to go through."

At the same time that the integration of applications becomes unethical as well as physically impossible, there will be a human lockdown. After decades spent making access to applications universal, computer scientists and software designers will focus on preventing access. Obviously, if bad guys can’t get in, they can’t do damage. Even good guys will face broad strictures on what data is available to them.

So there will be a surge in the development of software that blocks access to applications such as chat rooms, the Web, databases, whatever. And even features within programs, like the ability to forward e-mail messages, will be shut off. Again, the thinking is that since openness got us into this mess, only a lockdown will get us out of it.

Authentication applications will explode. The federal government will mandate that users must authenticate their identity to access the Internet itself, a sort of digital passport system for entering cyber-country.

However, as Dan Geer, former CTO of @Stake, notes, authentication can’t possibly keep up with the number of people who need it and the number of transactions we try to control with it. Authentication doesn’t scale.