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.
Misha GlennyThe 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.
Misha GlennyThe 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.
Misha GlennyThe Internet obviously changes things; we've seen that in the music industry above all else. As an author, I'm now having to deal with the fact that it's happening in the publishing industry as well. And publishing is going through a very difficult time. Some view it as positive, some negative, but nobody really knows how to deal with it. If you're an author it looks very challenging because your work can be pirated so easily and there's very little you can do about it.
Misha GlennyWhat has happened is that we have seen a shift in the past twenty years in the very concept of hacking. So hacking twenty years ago was a neutral, positive concept. Somebody who was a hacker was someone with advanced computer skills, which could expose vulnerabilities and could explain why systems worked well or worked badly and they were generally regarded as an asset. Over the past twenty years, a combination of media and law enforcement has changed the perception of the concept so that it has almost always, if not invariably, a pejorative sense attached.
Misha GlennyThe U.S. has the most advanced cyber-weaponry on the planet, and t if you look at the U.S. from the perspective of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, which runs most of its cyber activities, they look at you and they see Google and Facebook - the two largest depositories of personal data in the world - and they see the reach of the National Security Agency, which has huge digital capacity to know what is going on around the world. So the Chinese would see cyber as an un-level playing field, because the U.S. holds all sorts of advantages.
Misha Glenny