If there is a difference between information and bits we had better find it soon. The bit-count is bounding upward, no one dares throw anything away, and once "search" supplants "organize" there is no going back. Information may or may not want to be free, but it wants to be in motion, so much so that ISPs see their future in movie rentals and the speed of light determines how far away your trade submission servers can be from the Exchange and still do micro-arbitrage. Like a gas, information has to be collected, purified, and compressed to be of value, so any leak, impurity, or loss of containment is a loss of value, per se. The street price of drugs has a more stable floor than the street price of stolen data, the percentage of attack tools that are privately held is rising, and the workfactor for information defense is the integral of the workfactor for information offense, yet we do not have the quantitative tools to value our information. That is possibly the key — quantitative information risk management that is on par with quantitative financial risk management.