Classical computers use "bits" of information that can be either 0 or 1.
His typical routine involves exchanging small favors with contacts, collecting bits of information that can be leveraged elsewhere.
Still, he suggests a couple of bits of information that may help distinguish the two types of shock.
Because digital signals carry bits of information that are far more compressed than those of analog signals, they can transmit much more data.
"I'm not sure I've 'discovered' anything so much as made connections between bits of information that are already public," he wrote in an e-mail message.
What is really there is a boiling stream of disconnected bits of information that is turned into a moving picture by the brain.
But quantum-information technologies let scientists consider "qubits," quantum bits of information that are both 0 and 1 at the same time.
"There are millions of bits of visual information that people process every day, and we are just one of those bits of information that will go across that screen and our goal is to be one of those bits of information that stick," Mr. McKinnon said.
"It is impossible," he said, "to consider all the information that is relevant; so people truncate the information search early, as soon as they have a few bits of information that seem relevant".
But he suggested that, in the case of a state-sponsored leak, the state's identity and its motives were bits of information that were potentially as crucial as any other, and that journalists could not turn away from them.
After gathering more indications this spring of plans for an attack in the Persian Gulf region, American intelligence agencies by late April had come across "several bits of information that pointed specifically to Saudi Arabia," a United States official said.
