Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers!
Sometimes you turn on the news and you say, "Is there anyone left to hack?" Sony Playstation Network — done, the government of Turkey — tick, Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency — a breeze, the CIA — falling off a log. In fact, a friend of mine from the security industry told me the other day that there are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't. I mean three companies providing cybersecurity services to the FBI have been hacked. Is nothing sacred anymore, for heaven's sake?
Anyway, this mysterious group Anonymous — and they would say this themselves — they are providing a service by demonstrating how useless companies are at protecting our data. But there is also a very serious aspect to Anonymous — they are ideologically driven. They claim that they are battling a dastardly conspiracy. They say that governments are trying to take over the Internet and control it, and that they, Anonymous, are the authentic voice of resistance — be it against Middle Eastern dictatorships, against global media corporations, or against intelligence agencies, or whoever it is. And their politics are not entirely unattractive. Okay, they're a little inchoate. There's a strong whiff of half-baked anarchism about them. But one thing is true: we are at the beginning of a mighty struggle for control of the Internet. The Web links everything, and very soon it will mediate most human activity. Because the Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an old-age dilemma that pits the demands of security with the desire for freedom.
