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Suggested reading: Cybercrime - Homepage.

The first criminal provision in our copyright laws was a misdemeanor penalty added in 1897 for unlawful performances and representations of copyrighted dramatic and musical compositions. ... In order to constitute a criminal violation, the defendant's conduct was required to have been "willful and for profit." Section 104 of the general copyright revision of 1909 extended this penalty to all types of copyrighted works. Legislative History - Copyright Felony Act (1992), 18 U.S.C. 2319 Criminal Infringement of a Copyright

You would not care if you presumed the woman guilty, as you and the RIAA have

The plaintiff in a civil action begins as he must with the assertion that the defendant has done him wrong. Cause of Action.

Copyright infringement is a part of american criminal law. Criminal Intellectual Property Laws

Dispensing tea and yympathy is not the business of the american federal courts. The soccer mom can expect to take her lumps just like anyone else.

The U.S.Code defines copyright infringement as a felony. WWW.CYBERCRIME.GOV. Which is all that matters to your mates at Club Fed.

In the popular mind, legal words of art have no great place and all crimes against property, including intangible property, are seen as a form of theft. The association is ancient in the western world and cannot be eradicated by fiat.

That line was erased in 1992. Cybercrime, Criminal Intellectual Property Laws.

That line was erased in 1992. Cybercrime, Criminal Intellectual Property Laws.

As a provider, I can ask: Exactly what privacy do you expect beyond the TOS agreement you clicked/signed to gain access to my network?

The Wiretap Act "Provider Exception" 18 U.S.C 2511(2)(a)(i) enables the network, or those working for the network, to snoop on any traffic.

So, if you don't like that, you're free to make your own internet. As someone who operates networks, I can assure you, unless you're doing something that violates my TOS, I have better things to do with my time than read your crappy e-mail, and posts to /.

the US government says $900,000 in damage public and private.

http://www.cybercrime.gov/mckinnonIndict.htm

the US government says it was $900,000 dollars in damage.

http://www.cybercrime.gov/mckinnonIndict.htm

The article says that "a 1986 law gives less protection from government searches to messages more than six months old." This is misleading. IANAL, but here's my understanding of the law:

Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, email that is still in transmission receives a higher level of protection than email that the recipient has opened and has left in storage on a remote computer. If you have unopened email on, say, Gmail, and it has been in electronic storage for 180 days or less, then law enforcement cannot obtain the contents without a search warrant. If you have messages on email that are either (a) opened OR (b) older than 180 days, a warrant is not required; a subpoena or court order with notice to the subscriber is sufficient. (Sometimes delayed notice is allowed.)

Since most people check their email more than twice a year, the 6-month rule isn't much of an issue. The read vs. unread rule is much more important.

If you're interested in the details of the law, you can read Section III of the USDOJ's manual Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations. The text of the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is available on the same website.

(Note that this book is specifically about the privacy laws relevant to law enforcement. The book doesn't cover the law that governs wiretaps by intelligence agencies.)

The article says that "a 1986 law gives less protection from government searches to messages more than six months old." This is misleading. IANAL, but here's my understanding of the law:

Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, email that is still in transmission receives a higher level of protection than email that the recipient has opened and has left in storage on a remote computer. If you have unopened email on, say, Gmail, and it has been in electronic storage for 180 days or less, then law enforcement cannot obtain the contents without a search warrant. If you have messages on email that are either (a) opened OR (b) older than 180 days, a warrant is not required; a subpoena or court order with notice to the subscriber is sufficient. (Sometimes delayed notice is allowed.)

Since most people check their email more than twice a year, the 6-month rule isn't much of an issue. The read vs. unread rule is much more important.

If you're interested in the details of the law, you can read Section III of the USDOJ's manual Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations. The text of the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is available on the same website.

(Note that this book is specifically about the privacy laws relevant to law enforcement. The book doesn't cover the law that governs wiretaps by intelligence agencies.)

The article says that "a 1986 law gives less protection from government searches to messages more than six months old." This is misleading. IANAL, but here's my understanding of the law:

Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, email that is still in transmission receives a higher level of protection than email that the recipient has opened and has left in storage on a remote computer. If you have unopened email on, say, Gmail, and it has been in electronic storage for 180 days or less, then law enforcement cannot obtain the contents without a search warrant. If you have messages on email that are either (a) opened OR (b) older than 180 days, a warrant is not required; a subpoena or court order with notice to the subscriber is sufficient. (Sometimes delayed notice is allowed.)

Since most people check their email more than twice a year, the 6-month rule isn't much of an issue. The read vs. unread rule is much more important.

If you're interested in the details of the law, you can read Section III of the USDOJ's manual Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations. The text of the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is available on the same website.

(Note that this book is specifically about the privacy laws relevant to law enforcement. The book doesn't cover the law that governs wiretaps by intelligence agencies.)

link: http://www.cybercrime.gov/

The No Electronic Theft Act signed in 1997 removed the profit motive as a necessary element in a criminal prosecution for copyright indringement: Criminal Intellectual Property Laws.

It is convenient and cost-effective to pursue the uploaders.

But the downloader who is over-confident, greedy, dangerously exposed, and has somehow managed to seriously piss off the DOJ can still find himself in federal criminal court, where copyright infringement is treated as a felony, even when no money changes hands. CYBERCRIME

How many dollars of damage did he cause? How much prison time would somebody who stole that much get? Hell, a member of DrinkOrDie got 41 month (three years and change). That's for just putting software on the Internet! This jerk gets about half that for deliberately causing harm! I hope the idiot judge gets every computer virus known to man.

The proper analogy would be to publishing details of a manufacturing defect in a way that would make it easy and perhaps undetectable to sabotage Ford brakes

Fine, lets go with your analogy. Are you suggesting that person has commited a crime and that you have some right to imprison him at gunpoint?

I don't know French law, and I do not know what country you are in, but here in the US not only is it not a crime, but the legistature DOES NOT HAVE THE POWER to create a law making it criminal. This Department of Justice report to the Senate and House details exactly what they do not have the power to create such a law.

You know what? I discovered a cool new chemical. I call it nitroglycerine. Here, let me publish the recipe for you:
Nitric acid + sulfuric acid + glycerine.
You can pick up ordinary glycerine at your local drugstore. You can get the sulfuric acid from your car battery. Nitric acid may be a hassle to find, but it's certainly not hard to make. Heck, it's a primary component of ordinary acid rain.

Mix it extremely slowly over an ice bath. Warning: this reaction produces lots of heat. If you do not mix it slowly enough and keep it cold enough you will kill yourself. Hell, no matter how careful you are you'll probably wind up detonating it and killing yourself.

Assuiming you are somehow still alive, you will find a brown oily liquid floating on top. That is Nicroglycerine, a high explosive.

By your logic I have just published details that are "an open invitation to fraud or murder". Guess what? I had no intent to commit or cause any fraud or murder or any other crime. I have not committed a crime. You can certianly dissagree with my posting that recipe and whine about it all you like, but legally I have done nothing wrong and you cannot put me in jail.

Again, I admit I am talking about US law. And while the US is not magically perfect and I am not claiming US laws are magically right and better than every other country, but I am going to say that any country that gets this particular class of law wrong has seriously screwed up.

Note that we are not discussing how people "should" best handle bugs they find. We are talking about at what point someone has done something illegal and is legally culpable. If he relased a virus or attempted to extort the company, then yes he'd have broken the law. If he merely published details of the problem and included proof that the problem exists, then he did nothing wrong. And "proof" consists of functial exploit code. Any claims of a security problem are pretty hollow without showing an actual exploit.

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A .torrent doed not provide enough information to reconstruct the file. It could not do that unless it was big as the file itself, or at least as big as an ordinary zipped or other compressed format of the file.

A .torrent is an address where a file may (or may not) be located, along with some checksums to detect accidentall (or intential) curruption of that file.

once the court judges it reaches the point of advertising something (such as helping you find a drug dealer)

Please define the legal criteria you intend to use to discriminate between a website with a .torrent link or even a direct web link to a file being distributed by some other site, and a newspaper or website publishing the addresses of crackhouses and drug dealers.

If I were to give you detailed information on how to carry out a robbery on a particular bank, I go to jail as well.

No, not merely for giving that information. At least not under US law. Unfortunately I'm going to have to get US-centric on this detail, so there's the obvious cavet that other countries may handle this differently. There is a an excellent report from the US Department Of Justice to the Senate and House of Representatives. It details that they do not have the power to pass a law making it criminal to publish bomb making information. Providing the information itself cannot be criminal, under 1st amendment protections. What they can pass laws against are providing that information in a specific intent to cause that crime, or with specific knowledge that the specific person they are providing it to intends to use it to commit a crime.

It is the person distributing the file who may or may not be commiting copyright infringment. Aside from any potential copyright holder, the person ditributing the file is the the only person who knows or even can know if he is commiting a crime. It is his responsibilty to ensure he is in compliance with the law before making and distributing copies.

If you receive a free CD in your McDonalds Happymeal, you have no need to check if McDonalds has obtained the proper licence to distribute those files. And you certainly are not commiting a crime by posting the address of McDonalds' that are giving away those files.

And if it turns out the McDonalds had missed getting a proper licence for one or more of those files then they are the ones responsible and infringing. They are the ones liable for damages to the copyright holder to compensate for those copies. You do not go back and round up everyone who received one of those CDs or anyone who published the addresses were those CDs were being given away.

If you walk down the street and a record store hands you a free promotional music CD, you are innocent in receiving it. Your presumption is that they have the right to do so. They are responsible for ensuring they are not violating the law.

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Unfortunately, copyright infringement can be a criminal offense.

Since when can someone go to prison for copyright violation?

Since 1897. There have been criminal penalties for at least some copyright infringement for over a century in the US. It's not a new thing by any means.

There's a small amount of information on this here.

If the search of an ISP's drives is going to take more than a few hours, I believe it's standard procedure to seize the drives, copy them, and return them. I think the only time limitation is up to whoever signs the warrant. Parent is correct. They could easily just carnivore the upstream, and if they really needed to get at the server for traffic analysis, they'd just write themselves a warrant and do a black bag job per the PATRIOT Act Sec. 215. Why would you raid a place and alert the world to your presence if the goal is to monitor ongoing traffic? I don't have a lot of confidence in our government, but they aren't that stupid. (BTW, Section 215 does not sunset... ever! Ahhh crap, does that mean I'm now a rambling paranoid too...)

http://www.cybercrime.gov/18usc2319A.htm

There's quite a lot of information about Operation Buccaneer at the DOJ web site. It includes an overview of the investigation, a chart listing defendants' conviction dates, and past press releases.

I don't see Ashcroft's name on these webpages, but they do all spell "warez" with a "z".

wrong.

slashdotters love links:
copyright infringement

it basically says its a crime if its done for profit. There are conditions on how much money is involved and how many copies are distributed. If it doesn't meet these criteria, its a torte.

As I posted above, take a look here.

Well, you'd be wrong about that.

I would love for someone to explain to me how this isn't a violation of the Wiretap Act. Unless all the customers have given consent in the T&Cs, there would be a good case (for investigating this further. The exemptions for protecting the "rights or property" of the network provider don't really apply here, as courts have typically required a substantial nexus between the monitoring and the rights or property (think IDS on the DMZ). This sort of research project doesn't seem to fill that requirement, either.

Well, broadcast media has always been regulated.
Do you think that there should be publicly broadcast pornography? Or publicly broadcast videos showing how to make bombs?

Unfortunately I can't post a video here, to text will have to do.

Nitroglycerine:
Glycerine (available at the local drugstore)
Sulfuric acid (found in every car battery, though you'll have to distill it to higher concentration)
Nitric acid (you may need to make this yourself, but it's not hard to make, it's the main component of acid rain).

Mix the three ingredients extremely slowly and carfully in an ice bath. Warning! The reaction creates heat! Mix VERY slowly and keep it as cold as possible!

You've probably killed yourself by now, but assuming you are still alive you'll see a oily brown liquid form on the top. This is nitroglycerine. You can now proceed to kill yourself attempting to collect it or transport it.

I reccomened you read this Department of Justice report to the Senate on the First Amendment and the limitations on congress's power to pass laws. To summarize, congress does not have the power to create a law making it a crime to publish "bomb making information". They only have the power to criminalize non-speech crime, specifically intending to cause a non-speech crime to occur, or having specific and actual knowledge that someone intends to commit and knowingly aiding that person to commit that crime.

Ya know what would be a cool TV show? Get that New Zealand guy and do a Junk Yard Wars episode on building a cruise missle!

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Related to gmail itself and not the users so much (though who's actually held accountable for their own actions anymore?):

Federal law, and I'm paraphrasing, permits private ISPs to read users' email for performance monitoring reasons, etc. Right now, gMail is a private ISP, as it's open on the basis of invitation only, and they're granted much more freedom by federal laws. When/if they become a public service provider - which doesn't mean free - they fall under more stringent rules. In both cases, though, the eMail isn't exclusive property of the sender, but shared by the recipient *and* the sender. If someone sends me email, and I read it to my coworkers, it doesn't matter that the sender is damaged. Once I've read the message and left it on the server, it's also contained on a "remote storage device". While I may personally be liable for leaking the information, Google has no liability for treating my message (whether someone in CA sent it to me or not) just like any other message that they can legally monitor for performance reasons, etc.

Anyway, all the laws in the world mean jack squat when you sign the form that says "I grant Google et. al. rights to read my email. In exchange I'll use their email service." People can sign away their "rights" if they want to.

Good reading on this topic:
http://www.cybercrime.gov/s&smanual2002.htm#_I II_
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/1030_anal .html

It was a crime before the DMCA, see 17 U.S.C. 506. (a).

Copyright infringement is too a crime! You can even go to jail, depending on the nature of the offense. RTFM.

Not that I agree it should be a crime, nor do I enjoy watching the government throw around the phrase "intellectual property"...

Here is some proof:

Piracy--> DirecTV pirate to possibly get 30 years

Murderer--> Reckless skier homicide gets 90 days jail

Piracy--> Pirate to get 50 months prison

Drugs and Prostitution--> Darryl Strawberry get 18months for drugs and prostitution solicitation.

Priorities are in line, wouldn't you agree?

With AlQueda, the War in Iraq, drugs, what a stupid waste of law enforcement effort going after stupid crap like this and that.

The only reason this is getting any attention at all is places like the RIAA, MPAA, DirecTV, and other big businesses tossing mountains of money in the appropriate Senator and Representative's direction.

There's a significant difference between logging a public chat room and logging a private chat room. Under the Federal wiretap statute, at least, it's legal to log a public chat room, since a public chat room is "an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public." 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(g)(i). Does anyone know whether the chat room Detective Warchol logged was public or private? Of course, New Hampshire law could be different from the Federal law.

I think it's misleading to think of this question in terms of "expectation of privacy." Expectation of privacy is a Fourth Amendment concept. Statutes governing the privacy of electronic communication are often written using different language.

some math is a crime, and it's because doing some types of math can actually harm someone else

BULL. Doing math cannot harm anyone, and the US is dumb-ass for passing a law against doing math.

It is possible to sit perfectly MOTIONLESS staring at a DRM-scrambled e-Book and purely mentally descramble and "access" (read) that book. Under the DMCA that is supposedly a crime. It is absurd to suggest that that someone was harmed by thinking those thoughts. PURE THOUGHT CRIME. And you can be impisoned for up to 10 years for it (5 years on a first offence).

Circumventing DRM-scrambling is not an infingment of copy rights. If someone both circumvents and infringes copyright then that person is already guilty of copyright infringment and can be punished for that. Creating "circumvention crime" is thus only relevant in the case of someone who circumvents WITHOUT commiting copyright infringement.

"Circumvention crime" imprisons innocent people who make perfectly legal and legitimate use. It imprisons you if you you watch a DVD you own from another region code. It imprisons you if you if you fast-forward past DVD commercials that are flagged to disable the fast-forward button.

Amusingly it does NOT imprison you if you make a million copies of that DVD and sell them. You just copy the entire DVD encryption and all onto suitable blank DVD's. {They need to be DVD(A) with teh key area available which you can pick up on e-Bay . Most recordable's are DVD(G) with the key area destroyed.} Criminalizing circumvention has absolutely nothing to do with preventing copying. You can always copy wholesale without circumventing.

Every type of expression may cause harm in some cases

You can do math through pure thought without expressing anything and it is a violation of the DMCA. Thinking cannot cause harm.

As for speech, US law is quite clear that while you can use speech during the commission of a crime, speech itself cannot be criminalized. For example I can tell you how to make a bomb. Pick up some glycerine at the drugstore. Drain some sulfuric acid out of your car battery. Order NO2 canisters (used to make whip-cream) and react it with water to make nitric acid. Distill each of the acids to high concentration. Slowly mix them with the glycerine over an ice bath. Be extremely careful - the reaction produces heat. A brownish oily liquid will float to the top. It is NITROGLYCERINE.

Congress DOES NOT HAVE THE POWER to create a law against my telling you that. The Senate commissioned a report from the DOJ and Attorney General's office and it it says exactly that - Congess does not have the power to create such a law. They can only pass a law against my doing so with actual intent to cause a crime to occur, or if I give that information to a specific person with the actual knowledge that that person intends to use it to commit a crime.

So if I do the math to be able to fast-forward a DVD I own I have harmed no one. The US congress does not have the power to create a law agaist my speaking that math to someone so that they too can (perfectly legally) fast-forward DVDs they own. However that is exactly what the bill they voted through says, therefore that bill is not an actual law. It is null and void. The Supreme court simply hasn't gotten a case about it yet and have not had a chance to announce that it is (and always has been) null and void.

The law was drafted to claim that they were criminalizing "tools", but the fact is that the "tools" the law is targeting are actually information and knowledge. It was written that way in a consious effort to cloak the true nature of the law and to circumvent Constituional limitations.

The real circumvention crime is in attempting to circumvent our constition to create the DMCA.

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he is a previous child sex offender, and I have my own feelings about what should happen to those folks.

You make it sound like he was a child abuser, and if he was I would agree with you. However he never harmed anyone, his actual crime was possession of information. Possession of information.

The sticking point should be whether words can be considered pornography (in addition to pictures).

Not at all. I don't care if he wrote words or typed instructions into software to generate a photo-realistic image, in either case it was a pure work of fiction, and he kept it to himself to boot. There is no conceivable way he harmed anyone.

the law can prosecute for planning to commit crimes, even if you haven't done them yet.

Yep. However neither you nor the article ever hinted that he planned to do anything to anyone.

Harm is an intergral component of any crime. Congress may pass no law abridging the freedom of speech. You can't pass a law against shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, but you can pass a law against recklessly endangering the lives of the people in that theater. You can't pass a law against speaking/printing lies about someone (slander/lible), but you can pass a law aginst causing harm to someone through those lies. You can't pass a law aginst saying "I'll pay you $10,000 to kill my wife", but you can pass a law against intending to cause the death of your wife by doing so.

I read an interesting report that congress commissioned the Attorney General and DOJ to produce. It clearly states that congress does not have the power to pass a law against publishing bomb making instructions. Congress can only pass a law against doing so with intent to cause a non-speech crime to occur, or giving that information to a specific person with actual knowledge that they intend to use it to commit a non-speech crime. There is no such thing as a speech crime, any law involving speech *must* target an actual non-speech crime.

No matter how abhorent this guy's fiction was, it was still pure fiction and involved no actual criminal act. Imprisoning him simply because you (or they) don't like what he had to say amounts to wiping our ass with the Bill of Rights and flushing it down the toilet.

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both of these activities involve dead people

No, if you're careful and not too hungry then only one of them necessarily involves a dead person :D

Yeah, maybe necrophilia and cannibalism aren't obviously harmful, but declaring them as harmful isn't exactly controversial.

The issue isn't even about whether they are harmful, the issue is that you are claiming SPEECH about them is harmful. Information is not harmful.

If I post detailed instructions on how to make a powerful bomb in your kitchen, must the government wait for someone to blow up a building and kill people before my site is taken down? I don't think so.

You are misinformed about US law.

You can pick up glycerine at the local drug-store. You can get Sulfuric acid from an ordinary car battery and concentrate it by distilling it. Nitric acid is a component of ordinary acid rain, you can make it by mixing NO2 with water and distilling to concentrate. SLOWLY mix them while keeping it as cold as possible over an ice-bath. The reaction produces heat, so be very careful and slow in the mixing. The reaction will produce a brown oily liquid floating on top. This liquid is NITROGLYCERINE.

Not only is it NOT illegal for me to post detailed instructions on how to make a powerful bomb in your kitchen, but congress is FORBIDDEN to pass a law against it. As a matter of fact congress commissioned the DOJ and Attorney General to write a report on this exact topic - a report I read - and it clearly states as much. Congress can only pass a law making it a crime to post such information if I do so with actual intent to cause a crime to occur, or if I give it to a specific person when I have specific knowledge that they intend to use it to commit a crime.

Of course now we are crossing US law with a UK event. If UK law works differently than US law on this then in my oppinion it would be bad UK law.

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Are posted here. It looks like this is all 'by the book' to me.

preventing and prosecuting cybercrimes is now the FBI's No. 3 priority, behind anti-terrorism efforts and counterintelligence operations.
well, considering that anti-terrorism is what we developed homeland security for, they'll have to wait in line if thats going to be one of their primary goals.

"counterintelligence: The branch of an intelligence service charged with keeping sensitive information from an enemy, deceiving that enemy, preventing subversion and sabotage, and collecting political and military information."
Hmm....sounds like a job for CIA, NSA, SS, and several military agencies. They'll have to step in the back of the line there too. Maybe they meant to say "anti-treason" efforts.

Oh, and then there's prosecuting cybercrimes, which is what LAWYERS do. But speak of the devil, doesn't the DoJ have a...why YES they do! The CCIP, computer crime and intellectial property division of the DoJ. And we all know the FBI and DoJ are always holding hands....wait, wasn't the newly stated Director of FBI one of the DoJ? Why YES he was!

But if the FBI wants to prioritize its resources towards the CCIP, CIA, and Homeland Security, how are we going to keep up with the original FBI chores? Good question. (-thank you) (-your welcome) Unfortunately, bank robberies, serial killings, extortion, rackateering, theft, gangsterism, fighting communist expansion, fugitives, assassination attempts, watergate, hoffa's missing corpse, and the X-files will have to be postponed since the agency needs more money. On one hand, the FBI could try to defend joe schmo and joe tax evader, or they could defend the RIAA and MPAA who have pounds and pounds of money.

Some people don't agree with this and believe Dir. Mueller will run the agency a-fry:
They expect you to tinker with the machinery until you get it whirring along again. They want you to be the total executive who moves in, takes over and puts the place in order. In short, they expect you to do what a new CEO would do when taking over a major business operation that has fallen into disrepair: fix what's broken, shake up the table of organization, get rid of the deadwood, and start making big profits for the stockholders. But the FBI isn't a business. It's the investigative arm of the Justice Department. Its principal job is to go out and dig up the facts to back up whatever litigation DOJ is working on. Its field is interstate crime."

Seriously, I'm not trying to troll, but you could argue one way or the other and come out right: the FBI is doing exactly what it has been doing since its conception. Unfortunately, I think the diversity in crime has expanded past their "business model", and they'll eventually have to decide to split the agency apart -similar to why we should have split MS apart years ago.

...because with a confirmed opt-in system, the sender has PROOF that the user opted in.

This has long been considered the "right way" to do things by people with Clue.

Have you heard about any spammers being arrested?

You're correct that your statement has been made a zillion times, but criminal copyright infringement is indeed possible under US law. Some recent examples:

• Connecticut Man Pleads Guilty to Criminal Copyright Infringement
• Hialeah Man Arrested for Criminal Copyright Infringement

Here's the section of US copyright law which defines criminal infringement.

A better (but greatly simplified) answer to his (rhetorical) question is because there's a lower standard of proof and a greater chance of success with these civil suits.

Absolutely correct.

I've posted instructions on making nitroglycerine here on slashdot a few times. Not only is that perfectly legal, I read a DOJ report to the senate explaining in detail why congress does not have the power to pass a law against publishing such instructions. They can no more make it illegal to publish virus information than they can make it illegal to publish bomb making information. You can read the DOJ report here. Just mentally substitue "virus" for "bomb".

The report's conclusion is that they can only make it a crime if you do it with the actual intent of causing or aiding a crime; or if you do it with specific knowledge that the person you are giving it to intends to use it to commit a crime.

If they ever do pass a law against publishing exploits or a virus in general then the courts would be in error not to strike it down.

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"Copyright Infringement is NOT A CRIMINAL ACTIVITY that is why they are bringing up lawsuits as that is the only way to defend a copyright."

And you got five mod points for this?

Kerry Gonzalez might disagree with you. He's the fellow who's up for sentencing on September 26th for pirating the pre-release copy of The Hulk a few months ago. He faces up to three years in prison.

Kerry Gonzalez' case is a criminal, not civil proceeding. He was nabbed by the FBI and the complaint was filed by an attorney for the United States. There were no lawsuits. This is a criminal case.

And here's another fella in Florida who faces up to five years for criminal copyright infringement. And another guy in San Jose who was indicted and arrested for criminal copyright infringement for pirating software.

This does indeed refer to the NET Act of 1997.

In some cases this decision is clear cut: the largest and costliest criminals should be dealt with first. But in a lot of cases on your Cybercrime page (notably, some of the targets in Operation Decrypt) you chose to prosecute a few of the "small fry." The same dragnet that netted convictions for a $14 million offender also snared a few guys who only caused losses of $7000. Interestingly, among the latter persons were some of the most skilled embedded security experts alive today.

So, how often do you target offenders based on pressure from the crime victim, high visibility, high (criminal) intelligence, or other factors not directly related to the crime? And who, besides the prosecutor's office, weighs in (indirectly or directly) on these decisions?

That would be through a magical means. So obviously you're trying to stretch your argument into the realm of magic to try and produce a believable arguement. how ironic.

read some things...
When is stealing not stealing?
Criminal Intellectual Property Laws
IP theft losses -- if the EFF refers to it as theft all over their site then you really can't argue.

You're right that "plain old copyright law" did require some profit motive. But it wasn't the DMCA that fixed it. It was the NET Act, the No Electronic Theft Act.

Among other things, the NET Act will:

"Permit the Department to prosecute individuals under misdemeanor or felony provisions(1) in cases involving large-scale illegal reproduction or distribution of copyrighted works where the infringers act willfully but without a discernible profit motive..."

Say Lye Ow who is currently serving 24 months for a felony charge of trade secret violation would tend to disagree with you that trade secrets aren't protected by law. Look up the Economic Espionage Act of 1996. Here are the current cases.