John McAfee John McAfee Steve Rogers, the eloquent and polished FBI spokesman whom I had the pleasure of debating on CNN two weeks ago, has been on national TV again - this time alerting the American public that terrorist events equivalent to what just just happened in Brussels, are soon coming to America.

Let's put aside, for the moment, the obvious implications regarding new demands for access into all of our lives for “security reasons”, and let's look realistically at the true tragedy of this statement.

If true, then there is only one conclusion that we can draw: America, and its closest allies, are living in the Stone Age of cybersecurity.

China, has already stolen top secret information of everyone who worked for the US Government for the past 50 years, accessed critical information from the Pentagon. Homeland Security and the FBI, has everyone’s phone number, address and habits - and this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as we know. China has done the same thing to nearly every nation on earth.

I can assure you that the first word of an attempted attack against China, from any quarter, any person or any agency, would be heard, analyzed and dealt with within minutes of its utterance.

But in America, and within each of our allies, we seem to know nothing whatsoever about impending extremist attacks until they occur. What in God’s name is happening?

The answer is certainly NOT crippling encryption. In China, encryption is controlled by the Office of State Commercial Cryptography Administration (OSCCA). However, items such as wireless telephones, standard computer operating systems and internet browsers are not included under their regulations.

Think of how odd this is compared to the extreme paranoia of our own government regarding encrypted communications between people.

Yet, for the top cybersecurity experts, it's not odd at all.

China, by any cybersecurity measures is 20 years ahead of the US. So advanced, that the White House voiced open frustration at our inability to stop or even slow down China’s increasing invasion of our cyberspace.

China is not concerned about encryption because it's capable of gathering all inputs prior to encryption and capturing screen shots after data has been decrypted. They don't care what encryption techniques are used. Why should they waste time on the interim communication step?

If the American government could grasp this powerful departure from our archaic cybersecurity paradigm, then we might have a chance of survival in this technological world for which we have entirely missed the boat.

How does China achieve such dramatic results compared to the US? The answer is through a brilliant application of the foundation upon which digital science rests - mathematics. One of the most powerful tools of intelligence gathering in this new age of digital communications is a nearly forgotten field of mathematics called “Point Set Topology”. I chose this field as my specialty in grad school because it was trivially easy and I was lazy. At the time it had absolutely no practical use, about which I cared little. I was simply enjoying college life for as long as possible, and it's simplicity gave me lots of free time.

Topology deals with the relations between and among sets, or collections of things. The things can be anything, fish, buttons, shoelaces, or…People.

Let me give you an oversimplified example of how it can be used in intelligence gathering: Imagine that I am a terrorist (not difficult for my detractors within the FBI), and I have a set (collection) of people that I frequently or infrequent call in my phone. If China suspects me it will first plant spyware on my phone that merely transmits the phone numbers of my contacts and the frequency and duration of my calls. Nothing else. The spyware planting is trivial for the Chinese and they can do it from halfway around the world. They then plant the same spyware on the phones of everyone I contact, and then everyone that they contact, and so on down the line until upwards of 100,000 phones or more are infected. Since the software is merely transmitting interactions, each individual phone is minimally impacted and few, ever detect the spyware.

Next? They process these hundreds of millions of interconnections using another seldom used branch of mathematics called Boolean Algebra. It, like Point Set Topology, is so simple that you could get PhD in the field by sleeping through every class and shooting up heroin every night.

However, the combination of the two fields is one of the most powerful tools ever constructed for ferreting out terrorists and other secret societies, criminal organizations, etc.

YouTube/NTDTV It does this by identifying and isolating communication anomalies. For example: a terrorist leader may make exclusively outgoing calls and demand no incoming calls… quite common for some groups. Now… who does this, really, except possibly your drug dealer who calls you whenever he receives a shipment but threatens to whack you if you ever call him.

Likewise, if a terrorist leader makes a decision or gives an order, only a few people will be called - those closest to him. Within a matter of minutes those that he called will call a subset of others and likewise on down the chain of command. The software doing the Boolean analysis would identify this as anomaly and report it.

If this,we're to happen, the Chinese would immediately download more sophisticated software onto only those phones in the chain of command that would collect keystrokes and screen shots and send them home to China. Chinese foreign agents would then collect all involved before they could even buy the duct tape to strap on their bombs.

What is fascinating about this technique is that if any one person, or more, throws away their phone and gets a new one, the new phone will be identified with minutes of the first few calls sent or received. Powerful stuff.

But back to the stone age system under which we live. Our government is trying to find out what is happening after the impetus for what is happening has been activated. We are lost if we remain in this state of ignorance.

It would be better to subcontract our security to the Chinese, eat crow and swallow our pride, until we can stand on our own as a nation in this sea of cyber security chaos which we are clearly incapable of navigating.