I think that we're now deep into a struggle for control over the Internet and there are various actors - state, corporate, civic, criminal and military. The great genius of the Internet is its interconnectedness, but this is also what makes it an incredibly difficult problem when things start to go wrong with it and when people exploit for their own purposes.

The sort of sweeping parochial espionage and attempts to extract information from all sorts of institutions are well documented, but I think in this context there's a danger of oversimplifying and seeing that sector of cyber as a one-way street.

The anonymity issue is a big question. As long as people can disguise cyber attacks and as long as there is a sort of question mark over who is responsible, then the problem will continue to exist. And of course what happens in response to that is that there is a move to try and refashion the Internet so that anonymity is impossible, which of course leads to fears among all sorts of groups - civil rights groups, NGOs, and political parties - that the Internet is going to be used simply as a method of control. So these are very sensitive issues.

The issue of cyber-security, cyber-crime, and cyber-malfeasance has an impact on a whole range of issues, not the least of which is civil liberties, political activity, and so on and so forth.

The internet is fracturing into a series of huge country-based intranets, in which governments define, in the name of security, what is legitimate personal and intellectual communication, and what is not.

You don’t have to sleep with prostitutes or take drugs in order to have a relationship with organized crime. They affect our bank accounts. They affect our communications, our pension funds. They even affect the food that we eat and our governments.

There are governments who are regulating things in different ways and those forms of regulation often don't square up. So you have a real legislative mess, in the meanwhile various bad people are developing all sorts of tools to exploit the Internet for their own gain and the militaries are beginning to develop some extremely frightening offensive capabilities in cyber. Yet all of this is taking place outside of any international agreement or even framework.