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.

The criminal justice system - although this applies less to the U.S., where rehabilitation is not seen as a valuable contribution to criminal justice - in Europe where rehab is supposed to be integral, we have no way of rehabilitating skilled hackers. On the contrary what we do is we demonize them and continue to do so after they come out of jail because we restrict their access to computers by law. Crazy world, crazy people.

One of the problem with cyber is that it lends itself to preemptive action. Your assets in cyber-warfare are your opponents' vulnerabilities, therefore in order to quantify your assets you have to be able to ascertain how vulnerable your opponents are and that involves pre-emptive exploration of your opponents' networks. So in that sense it lends itself to some pretty nasty stuff.

What we're going to get as this next generation grows up is more hacking skills and this is spreading geographically also - Africa is about to come on the scene, South and Central America are going to be major sources of hackers. These people have got to be engaged with.

If there is an event for whatever reason, which interferes with the Internet or network communications, are people able to deal with it? It seems like our dependency on these systems is so great that the room for maneuver as it were is very small. So that is problematic.

It's great that the Internet can enhance and speed up our communications and that computers can do all the things they do. It's fabulous. At the same time, it changes our priorities. For example, before I would always remember people's telephone numbers and now I don't know anyone's number. So what happens if computer systems go down but you still have landlines? Well, I couldn't call anyone because I don't know anyone's number.

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.