Gov Says Existing Laws Enough to Fight Cybercrime

pluteus_larva writes "According to this CNN story, an interagency report released by the Clinton administration claimed there is no need for new laws to prosecute the bad guys. Apparently lots of "top industry executives" were involved in the outcome of the report; Janet Reno was flanked by Commerce Secretary William Daley and some lawyer from AOL at the press conference where the report was released. "

Comments

Here's a Real Crime

[mochaone]

Rob Malda is selling us out. I found these following cookies that slashdot stores:

religion
soc_sec_num
mothers_maiden_name
income_bracket
sexual_orientation

You guys can mod me down for being Off-Topic all you want. I don't give a damn about karma. I want an answer as to why those cookies are being stored and where Rob Malda is getting the information. You people need to know this. Don't blindly mod me down without thinking about the ramification.

Thank G-d, For Once We Have "No New Laws"

[Fleet Admiral Ackbar]

How wonderful that the government decides, for once in its existence, that no new laws are needed. Given that existing federal law permits the FBI to drive a tank through the side wall of your home and CS gas you until you suffocate and die, I would hate to see what the "new" laws would provide. Perhaps the freedom to cook up a little "Crystal Night" of your own...

I still maintain that the government should leave the Net alone. If there are no laws to let lax security administrators have the post-coital satisfaction of having skr1pt k1ddy5 hanged, at least we don't have to, say, have equal racial representation in every photo posted in a corporate website. Government intervention, like stuffing a hamster up your own ass, seems like a good idea intially, and can even feel good for a moment, but when the beast goes crazy it's a world of pain and sadness...

All this government talk

[Dungeon Dweller]

All of this government talk has me more than a little bit concerned.

A lot of this legislation is completely misguided, and often rooted in the hands of people who are completely clueless about what they are talking about in this area.

Many of the government's decisions in relation to anything computer related of late have seemed irrational, misguided, and harmful. Much of which shows a high degree of paranoia, and a lack of knowledge about the subjects at hand.

I hate to see a politician stand up at a podium and spout about how our world is at the mercy of "hackers." Or how "dangerous" those damn DoS attacks were a couple of weeks ago.

If this doesn't stop, this world won't be a safe place for anyone, us in particular. We'll have big software corporations that can shut down our computer for not renewing a site license on their screensaver package, they already passed the ever damned UCITA in my state (Virginia), people will be able to seize my computer because my third cousin was suspected of using a banned encryption algorithm in his sappy love letters to his girlfriend, and in general, we'll take a nice smackdown every day and beg for more because everyone who votes will be too dumb to figure out what the hell any of this means, and they'll cry when someone says "HACKER."

Ok, this is probably a bit much. But still, even talking like this, and showing this much ignorance, and passing misguided laws that smack of a lack of understanding and paranoia... It just irritates me.

That CNN Story is a little off...

[ATKeiper]

Check out the C|Net version of the story or the Wired version and you'll see that the goverment is still at least considering new rules and regulations - including some that would severely threaten the online anonymity we all take for granted.

You can read the DOJ report for yourself here. CNN is somewhat correct - it does say that "existing substantive federal laws appear to be generally adequate." However, it emphasizes the dangers to security posed by anonymity, and it does not shut the door on new laws.

We've got an archive of other related articles on our Law Enforcement Online page.

A. Keiper

Sigh

[Ross C. Brackett]

The attorney general likened the current dilemma to a modern day "Wild West."

"Perhaps it's a little like the Wild West in the development of America [with some] who say, 'Let not government be involved.' But there was also the marshals and Wyatt Earp and others who brought some order to it."

The Wild West indeed. Allow me to extend your metaphor, Ms. Reno.

For many years before the West was Wild, Native Americans lived there in relative peace and harmony with the earth and each other. There was no money. There was no need for written laws. Then, profit-seekers, outcasts and jerks from the east decided to head west to seek their fame and fortune. When they arrived, they walked around the place like they owned it, imposing their laws and ideologies; taking more and more away from the native peoples, until the land was no longer theirs at all.

Sound familiar?

We were here first, Ms. Reno. The US government didn't need to pass any laws that were specific to the Old West. Just imposing existing US law then was enough to ruin it for the original residents. Now how does that saying about history repeating itself go?

Yet another cliched view of native americans

[rambone]

For many years before the West was Wild, Native Americans lived there in relative peace and harmony with the earth and each other. There was no money. There was no need for written laws.

This is utter and complete claptrap.

Indian cultures warred on each other with great ferocity. Indian agriculture resembled closely what we refer to as "strip farming".

In other words, they were real people with as many faults and warts as their European invaders, who were simply better armed.

Please folks, don't get your image of native Americans from John Wayne films.

Fixing the problem so it stays fixed

[Animats]

The whole denial-of-service problem is being quietly fixed by people who are putting small changes into server and router code. What law enforcement does is largely irrelevant. In the end, all they can do is maybe find some kid and put him in jail. That isn't effective enough, because there are too many kids.

Here's my checklist of what needs to be fixed:

• SYN flooding Don't commit TCP connection resources until the transition to ESTAB. Fixes exist.
• Packet traffic overloading from valid IP addresses Turn on fair queuing (plug: I invented that; see my RFCs) at the upstream router. Cisco routers do this for T1 and down by default; make sure it's on. Big sites generally have enough inbound bandwidth this isn't a killer problem.
• Packet traffic overloading from invalid IP addresses This is the hard one. Turn on outbound filtering where possible. Routers need a feature that accepts a request to turn on record route for the next few seconds for packets to a specified destination. This makes possible a sort of "reverse traceroute". Requires R&D, a standard, and programs that implement it.
• HTTP request overloading Impose fairness scheduling at the listen queue level. Needs R&D, some kernel coding, and support in the HTTP server, but isn't that hard.
• Attacks on large numbers of machines A small percentage of machines on the net need to be booby-trapped to trace back, silently, attacks on them. There should be voluntary services to which you can subscribe (something like SpamCop) that takes attack reports, correlates them, and locates the offender. This doesn't need to be government-run; it's a reasonable business.

Doing this will actually fix the problem. Much more effective than holding press conferences.

John Nagle

Not out of the woods yet

[Compay]

The reason behind the "no new laws" (or "not a lot of new laws") announcement has more to do with the Internet's enormous influence on the US economy than any respect for privacy. Passing more anti-privacy laws might slow down the nascent economic juggernaut that is the Internet and upset powerful corporations like Time-Warner/AOL. For that reason alone the gov't makes the claim that no new laws are needed.

But...
Just wait a few years until the Internet is even more established in the US economy and more people rely on it in their daily lives. Right now, many people in the US are still extremely worried about privacy and because of that do not shop online. The mega-corporations and the gov't hope that announcements like those of today will help bring about a change in this attitude. Once this is accomplished and there is a greater social acceptance of and reliance on the Internet, more and more anti-privacy laws will be proposed - most likely under the hypocritical guise of extending our privacy! The US government serves the interest of the large corporations - that's why Attoney General Reno was flanked by a "top lawyer from AOL" and not a top lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, who probably were not even consulted.

The USA has roughly 4% or the world's population and about 50% of the world's prisoners - the majority of which have been convicted of non-violent crimes. This speaks volumes for our tendency to want to solve every social problem by passing laws and putting people in jail. Unless we don't get complacent, it's only a matter of time before we lose what privacy we have left not only on the internet.

Prediction: within the next 10 years, some US state will arrest, convict and execute someone for violating new Internet laws.