India, Dec. 12 -- There is a delicious anecdote that Harvey Mansfield, the legendary Harvard professor, loved to share when he lectured on Thomas Hobbes. In his masterpiece Leviathan, Hobbes famously posits that life without government would be "nasty, brutish, and short". Unfortunately, having neither read nor listened with due care, one hapless undergraduate, Mansfield would recount, went on to write his term paper on how life without government would be "nasty, British, and short".

This anecdote came to mind on the second anniversary of one of the worst cyberattacks in Britain. Back in October 2023, the computers of the British Library (BL) were taken over by hackers. When the BL rightly refused to pay the ransom they demanded, the ha...