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a projection of the future in terms of metaphors based on past history. However, among the difficulties that it illustrates is the force as well as the ambiguity of metaphoric understanding. A single appropriate context within which the author of Revelation was immersed while writing the manuscript has never been universally agreed upon. Moreover, where we have suggested that a primary feature of religious systems is the systematic identification of its adherents, this author of Revelation is still, even after perhaps 2,000 years, open to conjecture. Of course, the recurrent power of metaphorical understanding is illustrated by the fact that Revelation has been adopted as having current day relevance by virtually every generation of Christians for the last two millennia.

So, let’s consider a bit the journey that comprises this book. The original impetus for our embarkation was an observation by one of us (Bertrand) that highlighted a connection between ancient imagery and modern technology. Rachel Levy, in Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age and Their Influence upon European Thought, mentions the inscription of hands in the cave of Gargas, in the southwest of France. Hand inscriptions are found in caves dating back to 30,000 years ago all around the world, some made in the positive, with the hand dipped in pigment and pressed against the cave wall, and some in the negative, with pigment blown against the hand to leave its outline. In the Cueva de las Manos rock formation of the middle of Patagonia, a picture of which graces the cover of this book, the hand inscriptions are actually outside the cave. While this practice may also have been common, it obviously subjects the display to deterioration from the weather and other conditions. That assessment aside, what is particularly fascinating about Rachel Levy’s hands of Gargas is that many hands have one or more fingers missing.

While this might be a curious feature to many, it was virtually predestined to attract the attention of a specialist of computer security, because the time at which he read Levy’s book happened to coincide with new technological developments in computing. Thanks to advances in electronics, the circuitry of some biometry systems could be reduced to a size small enough to think of associating biometry sensors with a secure core in a tamper-resistant electronic packaging. One such biometry component was a fingerprint sensor presented either as a small square where a person would place a finger, or alternatively, a small bar on which the finger would be moved uniformly for the fingerprint to be scanned. The question, of course, was how to protect the integrity of the secure core if the system was attacked by, say, intercepting the connecting circuitry between the sensor itself and the secure core. The first idea was naturally to do what secure cores do when they are under an attack that they can’t manage, which is to shut off the cause of the attack by blowing up the circuitry involved, in this case the connection. For a security specialist, that act meant cutting off the fingerprint.

A finger missing from a body, or a fingerprint sensor missing from a computer, the similarity was striking. As the reason for the fingerprint sensor elimination was to answer a threat on the sensor, could it be possible that the missing fingers would also be answering a threat? To better consider that proposition, it is useful for us to delve a bit more deeply into the meaning and nature of threats.

Asymmetry

If anyone were ever to formalize the concept of threat, it seems it would likely be the military. In true form, the U.S. Department of Defense published the following transcripts of a conference call dated February 12, 2002, by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns;

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