IT security firms have been asked to put themselves up for membership of a special-purpose panel to provide security services across all of government.

The move is partly in response to a number of recent incidents involving privacy and security breaches at government agencies, commissioning agency the Department of Internal Affairs says. It sees the panel arrangement as a way of ensuring more consistency in security “skills and techniques” provided to agencies.

Osier-Mixon says that documentation is a high-impact, visible way to contribute to open source projects, but how do you pick which project to help?

"In general, open source works best when people scratch their own itch, like I did," says Kaplan-Moss. When Kaplan-Moss first contributed to the Python project, he says he did so for purely selfish reasons. "I ran into a bug that got in the way of a project I was doing — something having to do with reading and writing files on OSX — and needed to write a patch to fix my problem," he explains.

All movies have heroes and villains and Alex Gibney's documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, felt like vintage silver screen. Two-thirds of the way through, the film established clear roles. Our protagonist is Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and underdog hacker hero. His evil nemesis is actually information-silencing bureaucracy but the US government largely plays this role (voiced often by Michael Hayden, former director of both the NSA and CIA). It's a classic conflict: a battle waged over censorship and the public's right to know.