While working on tunsl I realized how powerful the peer-to-peer concept is.
A peer-to-peer network makes the following assumptions about its nodes:
1) No node is assumed reliable
2) No node is assumed trustworthy
The end result is an overall robust network. The problems a client-server network experience are not experienced on a peer-to-peer network. A client-server network is severely unreliable by comparison. However, as in all walks of life, when you gain, you usually lose too. A peer-to-peer network makes that annoying second assumption and it is also less efficient for communication.
I attended a seminar spring semester last year about a new NASA developed technology for air traffic control. The old way of doings (i.e. One control tower, lots of planes) made assumptions that are not true anymore. With today's technology more clever techniques can be used for air traffic control. NASA's SATS essentially places an air traffic control tower in each plane...the plane was not only a plane, but a control tower in itself. This is vaguely synanomous to the role a peer plays on a peer-to-peer network. A peer acts as both client and server. The peer-to-peer concept also appears in nature, take for example the human body with trillions of cells that coordinate in ad-hoc fashion.
EDIT: To be more descriptive, if each plane has air traffic control hardware/software on board, many planes can land in an unregulated air field without schedule. This is quite powerful as it can maximize utilization of many air fields with no control tower as well as eliminate the need for scheduling. There exists airlines that employ NASA's SATS technology, namely SATSair that will fly you anywhere at any time.
What does this have to do with terrorism?By eliminating centralized control (i.e. a head quarters in, say, one physical location) and distributing it in much the same manner as a peer-to-peer network, a country's infrastructure can be extremely robust against any type of attack. Out government (The US) is sort-of like that already but I am sure more can be done. Of course, networks probably need to be studied more - Network theory is a relatively new field in applied mathematics.
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_theory
