According to Vance, cybercrime isn't just a growing trend—it's a fundamental shift in the way modern crime works. It has already reached a point where nearly every crime in the city involves a cyber component.

"It is rare that a case does not involve some kind of cyber or computer element that we prosecute in our office—whether it is homicide, whether it's a financial crime case, whether it's a gang case where the gang members are posting on Facebook where they're going to meet," said Vance.

The city is getting help from the Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, local businesses, and others. This system of cooperation was actually set up in 2001 when President George W. Bush signed the PATRIOT Act into law. It established the Electronic Crimes Task Forces (ECTFs) under the Secret Service. According to the Secret Service website, "The concept of the ECTF network is to bring together not only federal, state and local law enforcement, but also prosecutors, private industry and academia."

The GMA News piece quoted above lists many other dubious arguments given by the Philippine government in favor of lifting the ban. Ironically, the way it dismisses or ignores the important issues raised by petitioners to the Supreme Court only serves to confirm the impression that the government is not really interested in achieving a fair and balanced solution here, but intends to push through its plans regardless.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Apart from the fact that the fear of something is pretty meaningless (except to those who sell security, and those who want to pass bad laws), the details of the survey make it clear that this is entirely a matter of the hype around Anonymous:

61% believe that their organizations could suffer an attack by Anonymous, or other hacktivist groups.

Despite the utter sense of fear that Anonymous has created over the years, 62% were more worried about the actual method of attack, with malware accounting for the most cause for concern at 48%.

Only 11% of the respondents were concerned about one of Anonymous’ actual methods of attack – DDoS, while fears over SQL injections dipped to a measly 4%. Phishing was a concern for 17% of the respondents.

So, despite the fact that Anonymous apparently has them shaking in their boots, they know that their real vulnerability is malware—and that's not really Anonymous' game. The fear is manufactured.

What this survey calls attention to, though, is a fact that deserves more attention: under CISPA or a similar law, Anonymous would make a juicy target. Security companies and the government could collude and share data not only to strengthen their networks against attack, which would itself be perfectly reasonable, but also to identify and investigate Anonymous members, notwithstanding any other privacy laws. Regardless of how you feel about Anonymous' tactics, this should concern you: privacy rights and the 4th Amendment exist for a reason, and CISPA would wash them away online. The authors of the bill insist that it targets foreign entities, but it is arguably an even stronger weapon against domestic hacktivism that will inevitably be used and abused.

One recent estimate placed annual direct consumer losses at $114 billion worldwide. It turns out, however, that such widely circulated cybercrime estimates are generated using absurdly bad statistical methods, making them wholly unreliable.

Most cybercrime estimates are based on surveys of consumers and companies. They borrow credibility from election polls, which we have learned to trust. However, when extrapolating from a surveyed group to the overall population, there is an enormous difference between preference questions (which are used in election polls) and numerical questions (as in cybercrime surveys).

For one thing, in numeric surveys, errors are almost always upward: since the amounts of estimated losses must be positive, there’s no limit on the upside, but zero is a hard limit on the downside. As a consequence, respondent errors — or outright lies — cannot be canceled out. Even worse, errors get amplified when researchers scale between the survey group and the overall population.

The Committee's proposals would make it a criminal offence to conduct cyber attacks on computer systems. Individuals would face at least two years in jail if served with the maximum penalty for the offence.

A maximum penalty of at least five years in jail could apply if "aggravating circumstances" or "considerable damage ... financial costs or loss of financial data" occurred, the Parliament said in a statement.

One aggravating circumstance in which the heavier penalty could be levied is if an individual uses 'botnet' tools "specifically designed for large-scale attacks". Considerable damage may be said to have occurred through the disruption of system services, according to plans disclosed by the Parliament.

That's not meant to dismiss cybersecurity professionals—obviously they do a lot of important work, and obviously the FBI is going to need their assistance for plenty of things. But to call cybercrime the country's biggest threat is to lump together a whole bunch of unrelated crimes, most of which aren't even new:

"We are losing data, we are losing money, we are losing ideas and we are losing innovation,' Mueller said at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. 'Together we must find a way to stop the bleeding."

The dangers posed by organized cyber-crime, rogue hacktivists and computer breaches backed by foreign governments have become a focus for the FBI.

Counterterrorism is still the agency's top priority, but the agency has retooled to prepare for Internet-based aggressors, Mueller said. Cyber-squads in every FBI field office now monitor for crimes ranging from mortgage and health care fraud to child exploitation and terror recruiting, he said.

Presumably the FBI already has people specializing in mortgage and health care fraud, child exploitation and terror recruiting—so why portion off the "cyber" versions of these crimes into a separate "squad"? To then combine those things with hacktivism and online espionage just makes the category of "cybercrime" utterly meaningless. It is indicative of their struggle (which mirrors that of governments, the entertainment industry and others) to understand a core concept: the internet is not a separate thing. And even if there is a good administrative reason for organizing things in this way, it is highly misleading to call such a diverse array of crimes a single giant threat.

First, losses are extremely concentrated, so that representative sampling of the population does not give representative sampling of the losses. Second, losses are based on unverified self-reported numbers. Not only is it possible for a single outlier to distort the result, we find evidence that most surveys are dominated by a minority of responses in the upper tail (i.e., a majority of the estimate is coming from as few as one or two responses). Finally, the fact that losses are confined to a small segment of the population magnifies the difficulties of refusal rate and small sample sizes. Far from being broadly-based estimates of losses across the population, the cyber-crime estimates that we have appear to be largely the answers of a handful of people extrapolated to the whole population. A single individual who claims $50,000 losses, in an N = 1000 person survey, is all it takes to generate a $10 billion loss over the population. One unverified claim of $7,500 in phishing losses translates into $1.5 billion

When someone is mugged, harassed, kidnapped or raped on a sidewalk, we don't call it "sidewalk crime" and call for new laws to regulate sidewalks. It is crime, and those who commit crimes are subject to the full force of the law...

Some of these crimes involve technology. So what? Criminals have used technology before.

Some of these crimes cross borders. So what? Crimes have crossed borders before.

While we are at it, we should mention 'cyber-warfare', something often conflated with cyber-crime. Cyber-crime is not "cyber-warfare." There may be state or terrorist agencies copying the tactics and methods of these criminals, but that does not mean that the criminals must be left alone until new cyber-warfare agencies have been created and funded.