You can bet that this will be used to push through draconian legislation in the interest of "security". I wouldn't be surprised if hacking/cracking/piracy became the new equivalent of possession in these coming decades.
The US hasn't looked kindly towards hackers since the early 1990s. This won't change anything.
The people saying that this type of thing is going to cause an "internet crackdown" of sorts have had their head in the sand for the last 15 years. Doubly so for the last 5-10.
Media companies have been screaming and crying about multi-billion dollar losses, and using all of their lobbying ability to get an "internet crackdown" to happen.
It already has. You could argue that most of the crackers of today are a result of it.
It's the sustained media attention that these hacks are drawing that's going to be the catalyst for legislation.
The government's attitude has largely been static on the issue, but they need a general population outcry to push through/rubber stamp legislation that's no doubt already written somewhere.
And what would this legislation be? You've already got kids going to jail for simple stuff. Look at what happened after the LOIC/Visa/Mastercard thing a few months ago.
Even if you need to insert your drivers license to the computer in order to access it, and every packet you send is signed with a user-specific hash, the only people it's going to matter to are the people who aren't doing anything wrong right now.
Cracking down is just going to create more crackers, and most of us in the middle probably won't really notice.
Don't forget that some companies have already shipped rootkits and viruses on their hardware before (Sony, Creative, I think even Apple had an incident with their iPod?) So the war between corporate lawyering+tech and the free world began a while ago.
You can bet that this will be used to push through draconian legislation in the interest of "security". I wouldn't be surprised if hacking/cracking/piracy became the new equivalent of possession in these coming decades.