Every online payment you have made in your entire life exists because of a war that was fought in the year 2000, in a single office building in Palo Alto, California, against an enemy that most of the world has since forgotten.

The war lasted eighteen months. At its peak, the defenders were losing ten million dollars every thirty days. The attackers were, by one internal estimate, twelve thousand human beings spread across four continents, organized into cells by time zone and language, coordinating over IRC channels that the defenders could read in real time but could not shut down.

Everyone remembers the people who won. Elon Musk. Peter Thiel. Max Levchin. Reid Hoffman. Roelof Botha. David Sacks. Silicon Valley calls them the PayPal Mafia. They would, over the next twenty years, found Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, and the venture funds that funded most of the rest.

RECOMMENDATION: Maintain active monitoring of the named entities and systems. Refer requests for declassified detail to the Office of Operations. You have been living in the consequences of that night ever since.