What you seem to be saying through the lost art of parody is that the al-Qaida members' interest in SCADA systems springs from their urgent desire to bring advanced water distribution and treatment technology to their downtrodden people. If you're right, then the real story is that we in the public and press have been so thoroughly deceived about the nature of al-Qaida, which turns out to be a bunch of severely misunderstood civil engineers.

Given what we know of the organization's past achievements, I think it's perfectly reasonable to consider darker motives for anything that al-Qaida shows an interest in. That doesn't mean that there's an actual danger. The NIPC bulletin may well have its genesis in a few minutes of idle Web surfing by a gullible al-Qaida member who took to heart the heated cyberterror chatter that's been spewing out of Washington for the last 10 years, and was quickly disappointed to find that you can't poison the water supply or cause a power outage with a few keystrokes. But even that would be a first, and thus newsworthy. Until now there's been no known case of a terrorist group looking into cyber attacks.

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