Schneier on Security : Fixing Intelligence Failures
schneier.com
schneier.com
The real divide is between people who are comfortable with technology and those who aren't. The divide is sharper now for several reasons: first, higher technology is harder to understand so fewer are intellectually capable. Second, even formerly high technology requires effort and fewer seem to be making even the effort to understand how basic electricity and automobiles work, how many people now routinely change their own oil or really do any other maintenance on their own cars (which was normal in the 1970s). Finally, the US (and probably other Western countries) have been picking up the aristocratic and Hispanic disdain for people who do manual work (see the chapter on Feynman's visit to Brazil in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!" for how this attitude can screw up even academic physicists).
Learning to use the technology, more or less by rote, is not the same as understanding it. And I have seen no evidence that people who routinely use the Web and its accretions actually understand it any better than they do cars or electricity.
Those of you who are younger may not realize quite how things have changed since the 1970s. The majority of men I knew then usually changed their own cars oil, and often did a lot of their own maintenance work. How many of the people that use computers now know anything about how they actually work, can do any programming, or understand the basics of internet routing or how viruses and other malware infect their computer? Judging from what I have read on HN and the Daily WTF even many, maybe most, so-called computer professionals don't understand what they are doing.