So argued Ben Hammersley, an editor at large with Wired UK magazine and the U.K. prime minister's ambassador to East London Tech City, the main technology hub in the English capital.

In a presentation that touched on the evolving nature of cyber threats here at the Brookings Institution, Hammersley contended that the traditional notion of warfare among nation-states is rapidly becoming obsolete as acts of kinetic aggression are being replaced by online crimes and other disruptions that can be perpetrated by individuals or small groups.

Moreover, high-end technologies that originate in government labs or the military eventually become commodities, a process of democratization that figures to significantly broaden access to tools like drones or biological synthesis applications, just as the code to launch a denial of service attack can easily be downloaded online.

The result of this Moore's Law progression, Hammersley said, will be a "constant state of asymmetric warfare."

Cutting by half the price of technologies that can be used for destructive purposes every 12 to 18 months, as Moore's Law would have it, will demand that policymakers rethink the core principles of national security, which would entail a reassessment of both the likely perpetrators and targets of an attack. A sober assessment of the changing threat landscape would shift some of the national security focus away from acts of war emanating from nation-states toward criminal activity and scammers, Hammersley said.