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.
Misha GlennyIt'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.
Misha GlennyThere 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.
Misha GlennyThe 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.
Misha GlennyIn 2010, you have roughly 38 billion dollars spent by government on cyber and telecoms security and another 60 billion or so by private corporations. So approximately 100 billion dollars spent on security, mostly on technological solutions, which the corporates are offering governments in particular; it's a very high growth area. So everyone is climbing over each other to get the contracts for government procurement on this. There is undoubtedly an element of this and that's what encourages, in part, the whole idea of locking down the Internet.
Misha Glenny