The crowd was around 450-750 people. But the church claims it was more like 2,500, and it Photoshopped in the proof. Except the proof is about as convincing as your thetan's origin story. In reality, there were no people in the right-hand side of the photo. There was actually a line of rented trees set up to block the view of people not so friendly to Scientology (see the photo below), as well as police blocking off a four-block radius for the event. And it's not just that the picture was doctored, it's that it was done quite poorly. They added people right on top of the trees in the altered section.

At the core of the problem is Congress’ failure to act. For years now, Congress has tried to enact meaningful cybersecurity legislation.

The risks are too large and the consequences of failing to act can result in serious economic consequences.

Recent cyber-attacks have illustrated the ability of terrorist groups and foreign governments to cause havoc on the Internet. The United States Sentencing Commission’s website was destroyed when activists attacked the site to protect the federal prosecution of Bart Swartz which eventually led to Mr. Swartz committing suicide. For years, the Chinese government has launched massive daily attacks against our government and private industry which are aimed at disrupting government operations, stealing trade secrets and undermining economic activity.

Recent cyber-attacks have illustrated the ability of terrorist groups and foreign governments to cause havoc on the Internet.

The United States Sentencing Commission’s website was destroyed when activists attacked the site to protect the federal prosecution of Bart Swartz which eventually led to Mr. Swartz committing suicide.

For years, the Chinese government has launched massive daily attacks against our government and private industry which are aimed at disrupting government operations, stealing trade secrets and undermining economic activity.

If stealing secrets is an act of war then America is currently at war with all of its allies. Espionage is what governments do so they don’t have to go to war...directly. What appears to be upsetting the Congressman is that the Chinese are using espionage to make money in a way that the United States didn’t think of first.

The Times wasn’t content with using other peoples’ reports based on circumstantial evidence so it went out and got one of its own. The study by Mandiant has come under some fairly withering criticism.

-It doesn’t appear to say anything new. CEO Kevin Mandia: "Mandiant’s not the first company to blame China for the hacks, but it was our turn to carry the ball for a little bit." Translation = “We were working for the NYT and that’s some golden PR.”

-Did I mention it was based on circumstantial evidence? Jeffrey Carr does a superb job of explaining why Mandiant saw exactly what it expected to find and then offers several other equally valid possible perpetrators, including Russia, France and Israel.

Here is my boilerplate response on the security weakness of U.S. utilities in regards to cyber attacks: "Yes, there is a problem. It is not a crisis. To do any significant damage any such attack would most likely have to be associated with a physical attack." (The sky is not falling, Chicken Little, but I bet I could make a whole lot of money convincing you otherwise.)

The UK's former head of cyber security has taken a slightly different tack, avoiding the terrorist imagery in favor of something even more dubious.

Major General Jonathan Shaw, a former head of cyber security at the Ministry of Defence, said people must be told to improve their computer security because the UK is "extremely vulnerable" to attack by criminals and terrorists.

He said there is a "special responsibility" on all citizens to improve their "cyber hygiene" as private computers are the easiest to attack.

Speaking on BBC Radio Four's Today programme, Major General Shaw said the Government must "launch a cyber hygiene campaign like they did with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s".

He said individuals are "on the front line" and must be warned their computers are at risk, as the Government is "not in charge of cyber space".

One recent estimate placed annual direct consumer losses at $114 billion worldwide. It turns out, however, that such widely circulated cybercrime estimates are generated using absurdly bad statistical methods, making them wholly unreliable.

Most cybercrime estimates are based on surveys of consumers and companies. They borrow credibility from election polls, which we have learned to trust. However, when extrapolating from a surveyed group to the overall population, there is an enormous difference between preference questions (which are used in election polls) and numerical questions (as in cybercrime surveys).

For one thing, in numeric surveys, errors are almost always upward: since the amounts of estimated losses must be positive, there’s no limit on the upside, but zero is a hard limit on the downside. As a consequence, respondent errors — or outright lies — cannot be canceled out. Even worse, errors get amplified when researchers scale between the survey group and the overall population.