I have long felt that the government acts in a peculiarly paranoid way when it comes to "cyber-crime", almost as if they are dealing with a mystical, supernatural force that is so powerful that our entire world is in imminent danger. Even people who are usually smart sound rather primitively hysterical on the subject, the way the looney war bloggers sounded after 9/11.
In this excellent discussion about Aaron Swartz this morning Chris Hayes and his guests talked a bit about what it is that scares them so:
This is a complicated topic. The world is structured around the idea of personal property and ownership and the threat of open access seems very radical and threatening to some people. But when you step back and look at it dispassionately, it's really not so threatening, it's just that the technology is reordering the "ownership" of information which, frankly, was probably always a stretch. It's kind of like owning air.
Anyway, it's a very interesting topic, which guys like Lessig and others have been grappling with a very long time. It's unusual to see it discussed in such accessible terms as it was on Chris' show this morning. There's a lot at stake here, but I feel quite sure that the government hounding activists to their deaths is not going to make things any better.