The Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an age-old dilemma that pits the demands of security against the desire for freedom.
Misha GlennyThe attack on the law firms and attacks like that are industrial espionage, searching for copyrighted materials to lift and so on; it's not quite the same as cyber-warfare. They are regarded as related. The Chinese are trying to steal an economic march on the West, which is a consequence of the fact that we outsourced all of our manufacturing to China in the 1990s.
Misha GlennyThere are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't.
Misha GlennyYou donโt 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.
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 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 Glenny