For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.

In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks.

There is no doubt that the Internet brims with spamming, scamming and identity fraud. Having someone wipe out your hard drive or bank account has never been easier, and the tools for committing electronic mischief on your enemies are cheap and widely accessible.

As Barbara Streisand discovered, adopting a militaristic posture against a tech-savvy mob of civil libertarians is not going to be of much help: Many of them run their own servers and blogs - and have thousands of friends on their social networks - so overzealous attempts to silence them only lead to wider dissemination of sensitive information.

Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses.

Once a term like "open source" entered our vocabulary, one could recast the whole public policy calculus in very different terms, so that instead of discussing the public interest, we are discussing the interests of individual software developers, while claiming that this is a discussion about "innovation" and "progress," not "accountability" or "security."

As economic life relies more and more on the Internet, the potential for small bands of hackers to launch devastating attacks on the world economy is growing.