It has advantages. One advantage is there is no slowing down the class so the rest of the students can catch up. The classes move at a much faster pace than ordinary classes. In fact some classes let you do the next 2 weeks assignments ahead of time. If you're a motivated hard working smart student you'll do fine but if you're not that kind of student or if you're in the wrong major you'll fail hard.
For example the technical computer science or information security classes which require computer labs are not better because at this point in time the virtual labs tend to be very slow. As far as how good it is for the students, I would not recommend online classes for undergrad. For graduate students it's fine but for undergrad they aren't going to have the skill or expertise to actually do certain subjects well without asking questions or going for help.
I wouldn't for instance take a math class online. For that the lectures help. But for a programming class I would take that online because that kind of class help can be posted in an online forum. Just so long as it's not your first class and it's not a hard language like C++.
The software isn't coming because until recently it's been hard to program to take advantage of the hardware. When I can use Python to interact with this hardware then the software will come from people like me.
Mitnick could be included on a team but Mitnick is just one guy. They should instead use around 5 hackers as consultants and at least 1 of the 5 should be a hacker who either has never been caught or who isn't a celebrity. Mitnick as a choice is cool but also seems a bit like a publicity stunt to hire him and him alone for that.
Wikileaks has nothing to do with Mega. When you even put them in the same category you endanger Mega. Wikileaks was basically functioning to piss the US government off almost exclusively for the past few years and wasn't prepared for the reaction. Wikileaks was threatening not just a faction within the US government but the entire State Dept itself. That being said the actions to try to block the flow of money were unconstitutional as Julian Assange is not an American Citizen they had no business trying to treat him as if he were. Even if he were he was not under oath so they had no business trying to give him a responsibility to protect classified information which that responsibility belonged to Bradley Manning. The only person who should have been arrested and prosecuted is Bradley Manning.
And why would we use filecloud when we KNOW the political establishment hates Mega so at least with Mega they wont turn over our most private thoughts to the police for political points.When it comes to stuff like cloud storage it's very important that the company watching over our data doesn't have a political agenda. If they do then they might abuse our trust.
You gotta work for virtual money too. Just using Tor is a risk of current or future government persecution. So you risk your future using Tor. So you get compensated but I doubt the compensation is worth the risk.
Don't get me wrong, it's worth it to browse Tor and see whats on there. Hosting is a completely different story with different levels of danger.
I see no real advantage to using Bitcoin and Tor just for storage when you can store it on Mega or anything else on the more reliable Internet. Also anyone who uses Tor receives the stigma of rapist, pedophile, terrorist, just by using it at all.
So what are the benefits to Storj and who is it marketed to? Is Storj supposed to be the black cloud or something? Once again for what purpose do we need a black cloud and who is going to use it?
It's in anyone's self interest to use 50 free gigs of encrypted cloud storage. The majority of the political dispute are just politics and have nothing to do with business or value to the customer. Megau is the best product whether you agree with it's politics or not. Bitcoin is a political move by Mega probably as a hedge out of fear the US government might try to cut off it's revenues somehow.
Mega and these sorts of products are just more important than the political special interests. The user having privacy to think as they like is an essential human right. This essential human right is tied into the right of having encrypted cloud storage. It is not in the best interest of humans as a species to give up the ability to have private thoughts. Anything you put in your cloud is your thoughts and anything you search for via Google are your thoughts. There might be instances where in the course of say a child porn investigation we might need to check a customers search records to rule them out, but there is no reason to check peoples cloud storage. If it's a situation where a person somehow has dangerous classified information then put the person under surveillance if it's about national security. The police have no business here, the RIAA has no business here, and Mega isn't going to protect people from total surveillance and it's not designed for it so once again the people who are against Mega are against it for political reasons only. Political reasons are not always in the best interest of the community or the country.
Sometimes we have to set politics and ideology aside and use the best product if it's the best. Google drive isn't offering 50 gigs of storage and doesn't encrypt it. Facebook doesn't offer 50 gigs of storage either. Once again they should not have a right to view out files as there never has been any legal justification for giving the police the right to view out private files.
Yes, there's...ways to improve on this, partial tables, encrypted tables with some info, nega-databases, and homomorphic encrypted operations. I'm sure every single one of your developers has a PhD and is intimately familiar with zero knowledge proofs and protocols? No...? Well then, shaddup. No, you can't even train them or give them the papers to read -- they'll implement it wrong.
But that is the direction we should be going. If it's implemented wrong then the buggy code will be fixed and eventually it will be implemented right. It should be done and the only excuse you have not to do it is that it would cost too much in CPU resources or be too hard. What is more important than user data? The user is most important and the user data is sacred. That has to be protected and it's Facebook with their goddamn lax policies that help destroy the foundation of the internet itself.
But the bottom line is most encryption only protects data at rest. Stone cold rest in a drive that's powered off. Anything else -- we can get to. I don't mean hackers. I mean remotely competent sysadmins, devs, devops -- even management with a properly written disaster recovery document.
Encryption protects data in transmission over the internet all the time. When you transmit your credit card information it's encrypted via https/ssl. Asymmetric encryption also protects data fairly well. Fully homomorphic encryption is new but a company like Facebook has enough resources to start work on a practical implementation. The problem right now is it's incredibly slow and not very optimized but that could change.
Your argument is that you can't train people to understand certain things or that there aren't programmers who can implement it? That is complete and utter bs. Facebook has the money and can hire whoever they want to hire and if you pay someone 100k a year to study and program it then I'm certain they could. It's complicated but it's not so complicated that you couldn't study it and be trained. So I say why not study it? Oh yeah, because Facebook doesn't seem to care about privacy, about user data security, about encryption, when they released they weren't even using https!
Btw yes I have written programs and I know about the client server relationship. I also know enough about encryption to know that you actually CAN secure a laptop. If the data is stored elsewhere such as in the cloud and connected to via VPN and that connection is closed off and encrypted, that would be a start, but the best solution is not to give employees access to user data from their laptop. Go to the office where we can monitor every employee on every computer and where we can at least filter stuff like Java and other malware so it does not contaminate the environment. Letting anyone connect their laptop to the network then take it home and then on top of that allowing Java to run on it ? Just plain stupid. They should have removed Java and everything not absolutely required for the task.
I don't see why it would be so difficult to keep user data safe. Keep it encrypted, use a VPN, stream the data to memory but never store any of it unencrypted.
Do they really control the internet? Maybe the connectivity between states, but I'm willing to bet, that if they cut off China, it will be back online in 24 hours and entirely independent of the USA.
There's no cyberwar between China and USA. There are minor clashes in a very stupid game that does nothing but put money in the pockets of third parties and make sensational headlines.
The economic situation will prevent true conflict from becoming reality, because right now, the USA and China both have their hands in eachother's pockets, if one goes down, they both do.
Right now yes the USA controls the internet at the backbone level. Yes they could create a new internet if the USA wasn't involved but the vast majority of sites are still on the US internet.
I think he was referring to those times when a "hacker" has been caught, but been too smart to leave evidence. That being said, I'd like some sources too...Google isn't turning much up for me.
Well I cannot prove without a doubt, but I can say it's a strange coincidence that whomever pisses off the DOJ somehow ends up charged with the sort of stuff which can get you life in prison. It doesn't matter if you're whitehat or blackhat, if you break the law or not, there seems to be a political element to prosecutions as well.
Look at the Kim Dotcom case and tell me that politics weren't involved there? Look at the Julian Assange case? Look at various cases across the USA including Aaron Swartz. A lot of these cases are situations where hackers didn't even break the law but did something which pissed a lot of rich powerful people off and upset the political order. Basically if you shake up the political order then you'll have to worry about the political police. That is cops who selectively choose to more aggressively investigate certain kinds of criminals for certain reasons. If you investigate someone hard and long enough with the hopes of finding a crime then eventually yeah you will but what is to stop that?
Hackers who don't cooperate with them seem to end up charged with rape, child porn, or just a bunch of bullshit charges that prosecutors can find to leverage on them to try to break them
I'm going to have to ask for some citation, please. The exact story you're posting on is discussing how the penalties for hacking-related charges are too high. If the government can throw you in prison for several years for hacking, why would they need to frame you for something unrelated?
Because you were too smart or whatever you did wasn't really illegal but pissed people in government off.
They wont work with hackers, they wont let hackers help them without threatening to ruin their lives or using harsh bullying tactics.
For certain arms of the US government, what you're saying is probably true. The Department of Justice is clearly taking a hard line. The Department of Defense, though, has shown some interest in recruiting hackers. This is an old story now, but Mudge is currently a program manager in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Mudge? That is one hacker and not even the hacker we would consider a popular choice. It's a start and I'm glad they are at least doing that but it looks like it's for PR. Like let's choose the hacker who is high profile so we can look like we are recruiting hackers. You're correct it's primarily the DOJ who hates hackers but I think the that a lot of what we see in the media is symbolic measures until it reaches a tipping point where we know a guy who was a hacker who now works for the government agency, more than just Mudge.
The government didnt set the record straight. No censorship required. No public official defended Lamo but they all bashed Manning. What does that show? Disdain and disgust toward all hackers?
Even since Operation Sundevil, the US has had this COMPLETELY counterproductive policy of hounding talented crackers out of existence, rather than nurturing their talent. Utterly stupid, IMHO, and frankly, the people responsible for creating and enforcing this stupid policy should be ashamed of themselves.
The Chinese have this 'thousand grains of sand' thing they do, where they nurture a huge and thriving computer underground (rather than turning them all in involuntary organ donors as they would). They're sent out to smash and grab everything they can from the West, where anything garnered is processed through a specially designed intelligence gathering system, where useful material is routed to local companies and government decision makers.
Granted, the Chinese Communist Party has no morals, but we are in the world we live in, and we have to do the same to compete. I guarantee that if I had any kind of policy input anywhere, I'd be doing exactly this.
At the end of the day, we have a choice: we can either fight with all the tools in our arsenal and shape the world in the West's image -- a relatively peaceful prosperous and moral place. Or we can let the Chinese Communist Party turn it into a quasi-criminal dictatorial dystopia. It's really our choice. In any case, it's the height of suicidal stupidity to fight our enemies with our hands tied behind our backs.
Here is the problem. The USA does compete but treats it's hackers and crackers like trash and although I cannot say China is any better, the USA has the tools to do much better than this. The USA still controls the internet itself. The USA could basically get the vast majority and practically all the best hackers and crackers on their side. The USA kinda does this but does it in a way which makes the hacker community hate or fear the US government. Fear can get people to cooperate with you but too much and they hate, the US government likes to use fear, threats, etc.
In the case of Aaron Swartz the US government was willing to use threats to try to scare him into submission. Why not appeal to some of the better emotions? On top of that, if there really is some cyber war and the situation is so desperate and there really aren't people with enough skill then the people who show any sort of talent at all shouldn't be put in prison. In World War 2 the Italian Mafia was recruited by the CIA to fight the fascists. In this example these were criminals but the point is, the US was always the most dirty of dirty at war, it's just the current iteration of the US government is secretly still dirty but in public trying to put on this impression of "tough on crime" and hatred of hackers which makes no logical sense. Ultimately these hackers CAN support the US war operations so demonizing them for what?
There has to be a clear separation between cyber-criminal and hacker. Hackers care about ethics and want to support what they believe is right whether they think it's the USA (patriotism) or social justice. Cybercriminals just want to make money and hack for the sake of hacking.
Right now a hacker can cause billions in damages, and pull potentially millions of dollars in ill-gotten loot, and maybe see 15 years in prison. That is way too soft in my opinion.
On the issue of Swartz, I don't know why the guy is some sort of cause-celeb just because he off-ed himself. He broke the law, plain and simple.
In cases where individuals get unauthorized access, and aren't doing anything with it (not Swartz who was planning to distribute), I think there could be room for more lenient sentencing, especially on first offenses.
Prison wont deter hackers. Also the US government WANTS hackers but HATES hackers. It's a very confusing situation where on one hand you hear about the US government talking about this great cyber war in which all the US cyber assets will be made to go up against the cyber warriors and assets of China or Russia.
But then you see the same US government dishing out long sentences. If it's a so called cyber war then prison will actually make the situation worse. You send a patriotic hacker to prison for 10 years, and in prison he gets recruited into something and when he gets out he's got an intense hatred for the US government and even more skill.
If this were a Chinese-American hacker stealing schematics from Raytheon we'd all be happy to see the harshest threats/penalties applied. The issue here was bullying at the DOJ. You can't fix that with a few tweaks to the law, and if you lower maximum penalties you will find yourself regretting it when someone actually does do something worthy of those maximum penalties. And if you close these holes, aren't they just going to find others? You have issues with behaviors/attitudes at DOJ that need to be fixed, not just a few sentences in a statute. So, sure, maybe they should tweak the laws a bit; but how does that fix the oversight issues? Seems like a nice way to convince everyone they "did something" without actually fixing the issue.
Those penalties wont stop people from doing it. If it's a cyberwar and nation states are sponsoring it then no amount of harsh penalties will have any affect. If it's not that then the harsh penalties will have the wrong effect on the wrong people.
Being tough doesn't really DO anything. It's all about looking tough but it doesn't DO anything but hurt people so you can look a certain way to some other people. Looking tough is the problem. The solution to this problem is REALLY simple. The solution is a tigher and better hacker community. If the US government wants patriotic hackers then it's up to them to actually promote that kind of hacker community and you aren't going to promote that by persecuting hackers. You promote that by rewarding the heroes and patriots (which never seems to happen). When a hacker does something heroic or patriotic he or she is rewarded with a jail penalty, a blacklisting from the industry, loss of the right to own a gun, to vote, etc.
This is the current situation, the governments typically claim that there is going to be this great need for talented "Ethical" hackers and that there is a cyberwar coming. Yet when we look at how the government treats even the patriotic hackers, they get treated like trash. Adrian Lamo is supposed the most patriotic hacker in America? Turned in Bradley Manning? And they thank him by basically letting the entire media declare him a snitch, an informant, and make him out to be horrible.
So if that is how they treat hackers they claim to like, and the hackers they hate end up like Bradley Manning or get persecuted into committing suicide like Aaron Swartz, where does this leave the hacker community? It's a sad state of affairs but I think it's because the government has no understanding of certain necessary aspects of the hacker community. The governments basically wants to use and exploit the talents of hackers but not give ANY recognition to hackers even if hackers save the day for them. They claim that the hackers are criminals, terrorists, and deserve 100+ years in prison? They treat hackers as if hackers are terrorists with no rights?
Is it only a matter of time before the government demands the authority to use lethal force against hackers?
They don't even care about the hacker community. They don't even understand what the hacker community is or what it's about. They view all hackers as cyber terrorists and criminals. They view anyone with certain skills are criminal. You can't even get a CEH certification and put it on your resume without getting funny looks and having people think you're a criminal. They view Slashdot as a place where e-terrorists and criminals go to talk about their cyber wizardry.
Seriously, hackers are like warlocks and witches and the only thing the governments want to do is persecute them all. They wont work with hackers, they wont let hackers help them without threatening to ruin their lives or using harsh bullying tactics. Hackers who don't cooperate with them seem to end up charged with rape, child porn, or just a bunch of bullshit charges that prosecutors can find to leverage on them to try to break them.
Why are hackers treated so bad if hackers are so important to the whole cyberwarfare scenario? Hackers no matter how patriotic they are get treated like criminals and terrorists and because of this no patriotic hacker community can try to survive.
Slashdot Mirror
It has advantages. One advantage is there is no slowing down the class so the rest of the students can catch up. The classes move at a much faster pace than ordinary classes. In fact some classes let you do the next 2 weeks assignments ahead of time. If you're a motivated hard working smart student you'll do fine but if you're not that kind of student or if you're in the wrong major you'll fail hard.
For example the technical computer science or information security classes which require computer labs are not better because at this point in time the virtual labs tend to be very slow. As far as how good it is for the students, I would not recommend online classes for undergrad. For graduate students it's fine but for undergrad they aren't going to have the skill or expertise to actually do certain subjects well without asking questions or going for help.
I wouldn't for instance take a math class online. For that the lectures help. But for a programming class I would take that online because that kind of class help can be posted in an online forum. Just so long as it's not your first class and it's not a hard language like C++.
The software isn't coming because until recently it's been hard to program to take advantage of the hardware. When I can use Python to interact with this hardware then the software will come from people like me.
Mitnick could be included on a team but Mitnick is just one guy. They should instead use around 5 hackers as consultants and at least 1 of the 5 should be a hacker who either has never been caught or who isn't a celebrity. Mitnick as a choice is cool but also seems a bit like a publicity stunt to hire him and him alone for that.
Really?
You can't imagine anyone having any use for: 100% censorship resistant online storage at an extremely competitive price.
Really!?!
I don't see how you can censor what you can't see. Mega is encrypted.
Indeed, he might have looked at what happened to Wikileaks, and decided to take preventive measures.
Wikileaks has nothing to do with Mega. When you even put them in the same category you endanger Mega. Wikileaks was basically functioning to piss the US government off almost exclusively for the past few years and wasn't prepared for the reaction. Wikileaks was threatening not just a faction within the US government but the entire State Dept itself. That being said the actions to try to block the flow of money were unconstitutional as Julian Assange is not an American Citizen they had no business trying to treat him as if he were. Even if he were he was not under oath so they had no business trying to give him a responsibility to protect classified information which that responsibility belonged to Bradley Manning. The only person who should have been arrested and prosecuted is Bradley Manning.
So the network can be put through social network analysis to produce interesting facts. That data can be crunched, so who is going to crunch it?
How many free gigs?
And why would we use filecloud when we KNOW the political establishment hates Mega so at least with Mega they wont turn over our most private thoughts to the police for political points.When it comes to stuff like cloud storage it's very important that the company watching over our data doesn't have a political agenda. If they do then they might abuse our trust.
You gotta work for virtual money too. Just using Tor is a risk of current or future government persecution. So you risk your future using Tor. So you get compensated but I doubt the compensation is worth the risk.
Don't get me wrong, it's worth it to browse Tor and see whats on there. Hosting is a completely different story with different levels of danger.
I see no real advantage to using Bitcoin and Tor just for storage when you can store it on Mega or anything else on the more reliable Internet. Also anyone who uses Tor receives the stigma of rapist, pedophile, terrorist, just by using it at all.
So what are the benefits to Storj and who is it marketed to? Is Storj supposed to be the black cloud or something? Once again for what purpose do we need a black cloud and who is going to use it?
It's in anyone's self interest to use 50 free gigs of encrypted cloud storage. The majority of the political dispute are just politics and have nothing to do with business or value to the customer. Megau is the best product whether you agree with it's politics or not. Bitcoin is a political move by Mega probably as a hedge out of fear the US government might try to cut off it's revenues somehow.
Mega and these sorts of products are just more important than the political special interests. The user having privacy to think as they like is an essential human right. This essential human right is tied into the right of having encrypted cloud storage. It is not in the best interest of humans as a species to give up the ability to have private thoughts. Anything you put in your cloud is your thoughts and anything you search for via Google are your thoughts. There might be instances where in the course of say a child porn investigation we might need to check a customers search records to rule them out, but there is no reason to check peoples cloud storage. If it's a situation where a person somehow has dangerous classified information then put the person under surveillance if it's about national security. The police have no business here, the RIAA has no business here, and Mega isn't going to protect people from total surveillance and it's not designed for it so once again the people who are against Mega are against it for political reasons only. Political reasons are not always in the best interest of the community or the country.
Sometimes we have to set politics and ideology aside and use the best product if it's the best. Google drive isn't offering 50 gigs of storage and doesn't encrypt it. Facebook doesn't offer 50 gigs of storage either. Once again they should not have a right to view out files as there never has been any legal justification for giving the police the right to view out private files.
Yes, there's...ways to improve on this, partial tables, encrypted tables with some info, nega-databases, and homomorphic encrypted operations. I'm sure every single one of your developers has a PhD and is intimately familiar with zero knowledge proofs and protocols? No...? Well then, shaddup. No, you can't even train them or give them the papers to read -- they'll implement it wrong.
But that is the direction we should be going. If it's implemented wrong then the buggy code will be fixed and eventually it will be implemented right. It should be done and the only excuse you have not to do it is that it would cost too much in CPU resources or be too hard. What is more important than user data? The user is most important and the user data is sacred. That has to be protected and it's Facebook with their goddamn lax policies that help destroy the foundation of the internet itself.
But the bottom line is most encryption only protects data at rest. Stone cold rest in a drive that's powered off. Anything else -- we can get to. I don't mean hackers. I mean remotely competent sysadmins, devs, devops -- even management with a properly written disaster recovery document.
Encryption protects data in transmission over the internet all the time. When you transmit your credit card information it's encrypted via https/ssl. Asymmetric encryption also protects data fairly well. Fully homomorphic encryption is new but a company like Facebook has enough resources to start work on a practical implementation. The problem right now is it's incredibly slow and not very optimized but that could change.
Your argument is that you can't train people to understand certain things or that there aren't programmers who can implement it? That is complete and utter bs. Facebook has the money and can hire whoever they want to hire and if you pay someone 100k a year to study and program it then I'm certain they could. It's complicated but it's not so complicated that you couldn't study it and be trained. So I say why not study it? Oh yeah, because Facebook doesn't seem to care about privacy, about user data security, about encryption, when they released they weren't even using https!
Btw yes I have written programs and I know about the client server relationship. I also know enough about encryption to know that you actually CAN secure a laptop. If the data is stored elsewhere such as in the cloud and connected to via VPN and that connection is closed off and encrypted, that would be a start, but the best solution is not to give employees access to user data from their laptop. Go to the office where we can monitor every employee on every computer and where we can at least filter stuff like Java and other malware so it does not contaminate the environment. Letting anyone connect their laptop to the network then take it home and then on top of that allowing Java to run on it ? Just plain stupid. They should have removed Java and everything not absolutely required for the task.
Are you accusing Mark Zuckerberg of being a hacker?
I don't see why it would be so difficult to keep user data safe. Keep it encrypted, use a VPN, stream the data to memory but never store any of it unencrypted.
And then give those drones to the police to make sure we aren't committing any crimes.
Do they really control the internet? Maybe the connectivity between states, but I'm willing to bet, that if they cut off China, it will be back online in 24 hours and entirely independent of the USA.
There's no cyberwar between China and USA. There are minor clashes in a very stupid game that does nothing but put money in the pockets of third parties and make sensational headlines.
The economic situation will prevent true conflict from becoming reality, because right now, the USA and China both have their hands in eachother's pockets, if one goes down, they both do.
Right now yes the USA controls the internet at the backbone level. Yes they could create a new internet if the USA wasn't involved but the vast majority of sites are still on the US internet.
I think he was referring to those times when a "hacker" has been caught, but been too smart to leave evidence. That being said, I'd like some sources too...Google isn't turning much up for me.
Well I cannot prove without a doubt, but I can say it's a strange coincidence that whomever pisses off the DOJ somehow ends up charged with the sort of stuff which can get you life in prison. It doesn't matter if you're whitehat or blackhat, if you break the law or not, there seems to be a political element to prosecutions as well.
Look at the Kim Dotcom case and tell me that politics weren't involved there? Look at the Julian Assange case? Look at various cases across the USA including Aaron Swartz. A lot of these cases are situations where hackers didn't even break the law but did something which pissed a lot of rich powerful people off and upset the political order. Basically if you shake up the political order then you'll have to worry about the political police. That is cops who selectively choose to more aggressively investigate certain kinds of criminals for certain reasons. If you investigate someone hard and long enough with the hopes of finding a crime then eventually yeah you will but what is to stop that?
Hackers who don't cooperate with them seem to end up charged with rape, child porn, or just a bunch of bullshit charges that prosecutors can find to leverage on them to try to break them
I'm going to have to ask for some citation, please. The exact story you're posting on is discussing how the penalties for hacking-related charges are too high. If the government can throw you in prison for several years for hacking, why would they need to frame you for something unrelated?
Because you were too smart or whatever you did wasn't really illegal but pissed people in government off.
For certain arms of the US government, what you're saying is probably true. The Department of Justice is clearly taking a hard line. The Department of Defense, though, has shown some interest in recruiting hackers. This is an old story now, but Mudge is currently a program manager in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Mudge? That is one hacker and not even the hacker we would consider a popular choice. It's a start and I'm glad they are at least doing that but it looks like it's for PR. Like let's choose the hacker who is high profile so we can look like we are recruiting hackers. You're correct it's primarily the DOJ who hates hackers but I think the that a lot of what we see in the media is symbolic measures until it reaches a tipping point where we know a guy who was a hacker who now works for the government agency, more than just Mudge.
The government didnt set the record straight. No censorship required. No public official defended Lamo but they all bashed Manning. What does that show? Disdain and disgust toward all hackers?
Even since Operation Sundevil, the US has had this COMPLETELY counterproductive policy of hounding talented crackers out of existence, rather than nurturing their talent. Utterly stupid, IMHO, and frankly, the people responsible for creating and enforcing this stupid policy should be ashamed of themselves.
The Chinese have this 'thousand grains of sand' thing they do, where they nurture a huge and thriving computer underground (rather than turning them all in involuntary organ donors as they would). They're sent out to smash and grab everything they can from the West, where anything garnered is processed through a specially designed intelligence gathering system, where useful material is routed to local companies and government decision makers.
Granted, the Chinese Communist Party has no morals, but we are in the world we live in, and we have to do the same to compete. I guarantee that if I had any kind of policy input anywhere, I'd be doing exactly this.
At the end of the day, we have a choice: we can either fight with all the tools in our arsenal and shape the world in the West's image -- a relatively peaceful prosperous and moral place. Or we can let the Chinese Communist Party turn it into a quasi-criminal dictatorial dystopia. It's really our choice. In any case, it's the height of suicidal stupidity to fight our enemies with our hands tied behind our backs.
Here is the problem. The USA does compete but treats it's hackers and crackers like trash and although I cannot say China is any better, the USA has the tools to do much better than this. The USA still controls the internet itself. The USA could basically get the vast majority and practically all the best hackers and crackers on their side. The USA kinda does this but does it in a way which makes the hacker community hate or fear the US government. Fear can get people to cooperate with you but too much and they hate, the US government likes to use fear, threats, etc.
In the case of Aaron Swartz the US government was willing to use threats to try to scare him into submission. Why not appeal to some of the better emotions? On top of that, if there really is some cyber war and the situation is so desperate and there really aren't people with enough skill then the people who show any sort of talent at all shouldn't be put in prison. In World War 2 the Italian Mafia was recruited by the CIA to fight the fascists. In this example these were criminals but the point is, the US was always the most dirty of dirty at war, it's just the current iteration of the US government is secretly still dirty but in public trying to put on this impression of "tough on crime" and hatred of hackers which makes no logical sense. Ultimately these hackers CAN support the US war operations so demonizing them for what?
There has to be a clear separation between cyber-criminal and hacker. Hackers care about ethics and want to support what they believe is right whether they think it's the USA (patriotism) or social justice. Cybercriminals just want to make money and hack for the sake of hacking.
Right now a hacker can cause billions in damages, and pull potentially millions of dollars in ill-gotten loot, and maybe see 15 years in prison. That is way too soft in my opinion.
On the issue of Swartz, I don't know why the guy is some sort of cause-celeb just because he off-ed himself. He broke the law, plain and simple.
In cases where individuals get unauthorized access, and aren't doing anything with it (not Swartz who was planning to distribute), I think there could be room for more lenient sentencing, especially on first offenses.
Prison wont deter hackers. Also the US government WANTS hackers but HATES hackers. It's a very confusing situation where on one hand you hear about the US government talking about this great cyber war in which all the US cyber assets will be made to go up against the cyber warriors and assets of China or Russia.
But then you see the same US government dishing out long sentences. If it's a so called cyber war then prison will actually make the situation worse. You send a patriotic hacker to prison for 10 years, and in prison he gets recruited into something and when he gets out he's got an intense hatred for the US government and even more skill.
If this were a Chinese-American hacker stealing schematics from Raytheon we'd all be happy to see the harshest threats/penalties applied. The issue here was bullying at the DOJ. You can't fix that with a few tweaks to the law, and if you lower maximum penalties you will find yourself regretting it when someone actually does do something worthy of those maximum penalties. And if you close these holes, aren't they just going to find others? You have issues with behaviors/attitudes at DOJ that need to be fixed, not just a few sentences in a statute. So, sure, maybe they should tweak the laws a bit; but how does that fix the oversight issues? Seems like a nice way to convince everyone they "did something" without actually fixing the issue.
Those penalties wont stop people from doing it. If it's a cyberwar and nation states are sponsoring it then no amount of harsh penalties will have any affect. If it's not that then the harsh penalties will have the wrong effect on the wrong people.
Being tough doesn't really DO anything. It's all about looking tough but it doesn't DO anything but hurt people so you can look a certain way to some other people. Looking tough is the problem. The solution to this problem is REALLY simple. The solution is a tigher and better hacker community. If the US government wants patriotic hackers then it's up to them to actually promote that kind of hacker community and you aren't going to promote that by persecuting hackers. You promote that by rewarding the heroes and patriots (which never seems to happen). When a hacker does something heroic or patriotic he or she is rewarded with a jail penalty, a blacklisting from the industry, loss of the right to own a gun, to vote, etc.
This is the current situation, the governments typically claim that there is going to be this great need for talented "Ethical" hackers and that there is a cyberwar coming. Yet when we look at how the government treats even the patriotic hackers, they get treated like trash. Adrian Lamo is supposed the most patriotic hacker in America? Turned in Bradley Manning? And they thank him by basically letting the entire media declare him a snitch, an informant, and make him out to be horrible.
So if that is how they treat hackers they claim to like, and the hackers they hate end up like Bradley Manning or get persecuted into committing suicide like Aaron Swartz, where does this leave the hacker community? It's a sad state of affairs but I think it's because the government has no understanding of certain necessary aspects of the hacker community. The governments basically wants to use and exploit the talents of hackers but not give ANY recognition to hackers even if hackers save the day for them. They claim that the hackers are criminals, terrorists, and deserve 100+ years in prison? They treat hackers as if hackers are terrorists with no rights?
Is it only a matter of time before the government demands the authority to use lethal force against hackers?
They don't even care about the hacker community. They don't even understand what the hacker community is or what it's about. They view all hackers as cyber terrorists and criminals. They view anyone with certain skills are criminal. You can't even get a CEH certification and put it on your resume without getting funny looks and having people think you're a criminal. They view Slashdot as a place where e-terrorists and criminals go to talk about their cyber wizardry.
Seriously, hackers are like warlocks and witches and the only thing the governments want to do is persecute them all. They wont work with hackers, they wont let hackers help them without threatening to ruin their lives or using harsh bullying tactics. Hackers who don't cooperate with them seem to end up charged with rape, child porn, or just a bunch of bullshit charges that prosecutors can find to leverage on them to try to break them.
Why are hackers treated so bad if hackers are so important to the whole cyberwarfare scenario? Hackers no matter how patriotic they are get treated like criminals and terrorists and because of this no patriotic hacker community can try to survive.