Richard Clarke:

According to Congressional testimony last week, 94 percent of companies served by the computer-security firm Mandiant were unaware that they had been victimized.

By failing to act, Washington is effectively fulfilling China's research requirements while helping to put Americans out of work.

Erica Newland, of the Center for Democracy and Technology:

Can export controls be meaningfully extended in ways that reduce the spread of ... 'weapons of mass surveillance' without diminishing the ability of dissidents to connect and communicate?

Amrutha Gayathri:

In a statement released Thursday, Reza Taghipour, the Iranian minister for Information and Communications Technology, announced the setting up of a national Intranet and the effective blockage of services like Google, Gmail, Google Plus, Yahoo and Hotmail, in line with Iran's plan for a "clean Internet."

Christopher Mims:

Most of us leave Wi-Fi on by default, in part because our phones chastise us when we don't. (Triangulation by Wi-Fi hotspots is important for making location services more accurate.) But you probably didn't realize that, using proprietary new "nodes" from Navizon, any device with an active Wi-Fi radio can be seen by a system like Navizon's.

Matt Schwartz:

People tend to believe that Web operators will keep their data safe in perpetuity. They entrust much more than poetry to unseen servers maintained by system administrators they've never met.

Lloyd's Risk Index, on cyber insecurity:

Even large businesses need to ask if they really understand the nature of the risk to which they are exposed.

Alex Howard:

The simple reality is that in Washington, national security trumps everything.

Abu Muqawama:

Military cyberpower, once invisible to all but a few defense specialists, is slowly becoming visible. In some ways the current wave of commentary on Stuxnet is simply a delayed reaction to what should have been apparent once the electromagnetic spectrum was utilized by Abraham Lincoln to command the American Civil War: a new operational domain has military as well as civilian purposes. The civilian use of cyberspace, like the civilian use of the ocean or space, provides commercial and cultural value, but there is also a power-political context that simply cannot be wished away.

Yochai Benkler:

Seeing Anonymous primarily as a cybersecurity threat is like analyzing the breadth of the antiwar movement and 1960s counterculture by focusing only on the Weathermen. Anonymous is not an organization. It is an idea, a zeitgeist, coupled with a set of social and technical practices. Diffuse and leaderless, its driving force is "lulz" -- irreverence, playfulness, and spectacle. It is also a protest movement, inspiring action both on and off the Internet, that seeks to contest the abuse of power by governments and corporations and promote transparency in politics and business. Just as the antiwar movement had its bomb-throwing radicals, online hacktivists organizing under the banner of Anonymous sometimes cross the boundaries of legitimate protest. But a fearful overreaction to Anonymous poses a greater threat to freedom of expression, creativity, and innovation than any threat posed by the disruptions themselves.

Viewing Anonymous purely as a matter of crime reduction or national security will lead governments to suppress it and ignore any countervailing considerations. A more appropriate, balanced response to Anonymous' attacks would err on the side of absorbing damage and making the hacks' targets resilient, rather than aggressively surveilling and prosecuting the network and its participants.