Is it really worth prosecuting the Wikileaks “hacktivists”?

“If you have a very successful or high-profile attack, or an attack that causes a tremendous amount of damage because of its timing, you’ll at least get an investigation,” said Mark Rasch, who founded the Justice Department computer crimes unit years ago. “Let’s face it. Most computer crimes are not prosecuted, because we rarely catch the people responsible.”…

“What we may be looking at is 15- and 16-year-old kids who do this … not as a prank but as a protest,” Rasch said. “And do we really want to spend the time, the money, the energy and the resources to bring a bunch of these kids over from Belgium or Holland or the Netherlands?”…

Dodd, who works with U.S. intelligence and military agencies, said he’s worried that Operation Payback will give hackers and more dangerous people bad ideas for the future.

“I’m afraid it’s going to probably set a precedent,” Dodd said. “It’s going to be one of those events that happened that do show the rest of the community out there and the rest of the world the power of cyberattacks.”