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[Thomas Beckett <thomas AT tbeckett.com>]

        Here's an interesting speech from two years ago by Thomas Friedman.  
He
wrote an excellent book with the same title as the speech.  

http://www-irps.ucsd.edu/irps/speeches/spfriedman102799.html

Relevant excerpt:  

        "Now unfortunately there aren't just super-empowered good guys, or 
good
gals in this system. Alas, there are super-empowered angry men and women
as  well. Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire who blew up two
American embassies in East Africa last year, was also super empowered.
He was a super-empowered angry man. He also had his own network, a kind
of "jihad online," which he used to take on the United States. 

        "You know what we did?. We fired 66 cruise missiles at Osama Bin 
Laden.
Think about that. We fired 66 cruise missiles at one million dollars a
copy at a person. That doesn't happen very often. That was a super power
against a super-empowered angry man. Ramzi Yousef, remember him? He was
the gentleman who tried to blow up the two tallest buildings in America,
the World Trade Center. I always wondered, what did Ramzi Yousef want?
Did he want a Palestinian state in Brooklyn? Did he want an Islamic
republic in New  Jersey? What did he want? So for the book, I went back
and reread the court records and it's very clear what he wanted. He
wanted to blow up the two tallest buildings in America. Period.
Paragraph ended. 

        ""Globalization is Americanization" had gotten in his face and had
empowered him as an individual to do something about it, and the only
reason we caught him was remarkably, remarkably one of his
co-conspirators went back to the Ryder Truck Agency where they rented
the truck and tried to get his $400 deposit back, claiming the truck had
been stolen. Which is a wonderful story. In the morning, you blow up the
World Trade Center on the basis of your rage with America, and in the
afternoon you use American contract law to get your deposit back. 

        "That tipped off the FBI; they tracked Ramzi Yousef to an apartment in
the Philippines. They broke in, and they found all his plots on the C:
drive of his Toshiba laptop, which is exactly where he kept them. He was
a super-empowered angry man. And if you really want to get scared, when
you go home tonight and crawl in under the covers, think about this.
It's not that Ramzi Yousef or Osama Bin Laden can ever be super powers.
It's how many people today can be Ramzi Yousef or Osama Bin Laden."