This failure of communication may look bad, but it is hardly unprecedented: since Eisenhower, presidents have seldom used their cabinets to make policy.
The effect of paralinguistic communication is so potent that it can make bad news actually sound palatable or, conversely, take all the joy out of a positive message.
Kaspersky Labs' namesake Eugene Kaspersky is worried that widely distributed and potentially state-sponsored malware like Flame and Stuxnet pose dire threats to often lightly protected infrastructure like communication and power plants -- whatever your nationality, it's clearly bad for the civilian population of a given country to suffer even collateral damage from cyberattacks.