Kept unclassified but vague, a 1997 report on the National Information Infrastructure masked a widening gap between federal warnings and a military pivot toward offensive cyber-war.
The Army's 1998 strategy for 'protecting' the web masked a deeper interest in how to dismantle it, leaving the public's data exposed to the very agencies claiming to shield it.
While the FBI tracked hackers attacking the Air Force in 1998, Sandia researchers built a system to scrub the gore from security failures, keeping the true scale of nuclear vulnerability in the dark.
Behind the unclassified veneer of a 1996 defense study lies a calculated effort to secure massive funding for an era of warfare that remains largely invisible to the public.