I will say this for these folks, they seem to have gone 'all in.'

One of the interesting thing about politics is how hard it is to change things. To get a bill passed or an amendment added you need to get other politicians on your side, you need a compelling plan, and then you need lots of follow through. Controversy is to politics like energy is to chemical reactions. The more controversy you have around it increases the 'energy' level, more politicians are willing to commit to a vote because some of their constituents are telling the 'you gotta do something about ...'

The actions of these guys and wikileaks and anonymous are feeding a lot of energy into this system. I listened to a presentation by the East-West Institute [1] which was attempting to harness stuff like this to make 'cyber terrorism' a national issue.

Groups like this take the energy that is out there and channel it into "policy workshops" which are really nothing more than telling the politicians that if they follow their recommendations it will address this growing need. They feed off this stuff. Nobody listens to you if they don't think there are any issues that need addressing (the old "Everything is fine! Why change anything?" dilemma).

The truly fascinating thing about this is there was a great analysis on terrorist groups and whether or not they ever achieved their stated goals [2]. Basically terrorists who don't have a special interest group or political action committee (PAC) in place to harness the energy created by the terrorist acts for durable change are unsuccessful at making any change. Instead the energy they produce, the ability for the political system to make changes, is harnessed by others to make the changes that these other people want to make instead.

Its a weird thing but when you look at how it has been done by PACs and SIGs it can be really enlightening. Its like security theater at the airport, everyone (even the people who do it), know that it does nothing to actually make people safer on planes. However what it does do is give another person their own mini-military unit (DHS) and a way to influence things.

This happens on the small scale too, some horrible thing will happen due to some highly random event or events, and it causes great public sympathy and outcry. Someone comes along and taps that energy, promises it will "never happen again" if you do what they say, and they aren't really lying, the odds of that thing happening again could be extremely remote.

To use a current example, people who are proposing their gear by installed in nuclear plants so that the next time a 9.0 quake + 40' tsunami hits the plant will be safe. Since the likelyhood of another 9.x quake + Tsunami happening again in our or even our grandchildren's lifetime is effectively 0 they could do anything and claim victory. Sell special "Tsunami resistant latex paint" which if you coat a building with this the water will go around instead. Its a crazy claim but someone will buy into "this will make the bad thing not happen again" and guess what? It doesn't happen again because the chance of it happening is so close to zero.

Lulz here is dumping huge amounts of energy into the system. I don't see any 'good' guys lobbying effectively for tapping that to make for better network security or IT systems. I do see people like the DHS saying the need a budget appropriation of 50M$ to staff up a new department of expert counter-hackers to mitigate this new threat.

When people with money say "We have to do something!" there will always be people who stand up and offer to do something in exchange for their money.

[1] http://www.ewi.info/

[2] http://english.safe-democracy.org/causes/