Quote of the day: “The world was becoming borderless”

The keynote speaker at today’s session of GEOINT was Gen. Anthony Zinni (Ret.), the former Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). Zinni provided "observations", taken from his years of military experience, about the state of information flow and how this was shaping military and business planning. Zinni was stationed in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down and retold the story of how he passed through "checkpoint Charlie" over to the former East Berlin side only to enter a completely different world after having been isolated from the western world for so long. But in the process, he recognized that more than physcal walls were coming down. As a corollary, he fast-forwarded to his experience of his trip down from Washington DC and observing how people were communicating wirelessly with laptops and cell phones, as is so common. Hence, he observed how people were communicating via the ether in ways that have evolved in only the last 20 years. As such he said, "The world was becoming borderless."  As a consequence, he commented on the fact that just as we are able to conduct business anywhere in the world because of technology, terrorists were actively entering our borders with a different intent. The battlefield has radically changed to a borderless realm where the enemy may be closer than we think.