Scam Czars to the West: “You are getting what you deserve.”

The NYTimes website has an interesting article—Scam Czars: What’s Russian for ‘Hacker’? (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/weekinreview/21levy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp )

Here are some quotes from that article:
Russia has become a leading source of Internet ills, home to legions of high-tech rogues who operate with seeming impunity from the anonymous living rooms of Novosibirsk or the shadowy cybercafes of St. Petersburg… The security firms have not received much assistance from the Russian government, which seems to show little interest in a crackdown, as if officials privately take some pleasure in knowing that their compatriots are tormenting millions of people in the West. In fact, Russian hackers became something akin to national heroes last spring when a wave of Internet attacks was launched from Russia against Web sites in Estonia, the former Soviet republic. The incidents began after the Estonians angered the Kremlin by moving a Soviet-era war monument… Of course, Russia is not the only generator of Internet havoc... Internet security experts say that only the United States and China rival Russia in hacker activity. But Russia has only 28 million Internet users, according to rough estimates, compared with 210 million in the United States and 150 million in China, meaning that Russia has a higher percentage of scammers…. Even so, there remains a sense here that Russian hackers afflict the West far more than Russia, so why bother with them. On a Livejournal Russian forum last week, The New York Times asked participants why Russians have a reputation for Internet crime. “I don’t see in this a big tragedy,” said a respondent who used the name Lightwatch. “Western countries played not the smallest role in the fall of the Soviet Union. But the Russians have a very amusing feature — they are able to get up from their knees, under any conditions or under any circumstances.” As for the West? “You are getting what you deserve.”

What a “bravo” way of constructing an online nationalism course from a new generation of IT-equipped Russians! Indeed, it is a totally Putin-style “Saying NO to the West!”