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 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.

The 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.

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.

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.

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.