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Paper: "Cybercrimes: A Practical Approach..."
tgeller writes "The Santa Clara Computer High Technology Law Journal just published a paper by lawyer Eric Sinrod and William P. Reilly: "Cybercrimes: A Practical Approach to
the Application of Federal Computer Crime Laws". The 54-page paper gives an excellent overview of computer crime methods, legal remedies, and motives. And he gets the "hacker/cracker" distinction right! Download the PDF or Word version (sorry, no hypertext)." Good background info if you are interested in this.
Sigh. He's so close to a logical viewpoint, it's frustrating. His first point is incongruous with his second. What he doesn't realize is that successful prosecution of the perpetrators prevents system administrators from collaborating to devise plans for rapid network response. There's no incentive for the Internet community to work to patch holes in security when we can just rely on fear of governmental reprimand to do the same thing. The inverse is true as well: fixing DoS problems on a technical level prevents more government regulation of the Internet from having to occur.
Yes, passing laws is the easier solution, but haven't we learned this lesson already? The government is simply not a qualified caretaker for the Internet! The more we let governments assume jurisdiction, the worse the Internet gets. Duh. Joe Senator or even Jane Supreme-Court-Justice is simply not as qualified as you or me to make decisions about how the Internet is run. The problem is so many people are reliant on the government protecting them from everything, they've forgotten how to do things for themselves. The problem is, the biggest whiners also have the most amount of money and money = political influence. God bless America.
The above post is probably just flamebait, but sadly enough there are many people who actually hold similar beliefs. The reality is that trading DivX and mp3 files is not only very minor--there are even conflicting studies as to whether it hurts or helps CD sales--but these days it's also arguably a form of civil disobedience.
I consider it a protest against the perversion of copyright and other IP laws by big corporations which are insinuating themselves into positions of undue influence in government; corporations have vastly more resources than individuals, and as such individuals can no longer influence their government to such a great extent as corporations can.
The whole notion that IP no longer passes into the public domain after a reasonable period of time in which its creators can derive profit, but instead remains locked up for 100 years after the death of the creator, is deplorable. Corporations like Disney made their fortunes by using public domain IP (half of Disney's cartoons are from other people's stories, used for free) which they'd have never been able to use under the IP law they've now implemented to keep their own creations indefinitely instead of giving back to the public domain they so richly borrowed from. The music industry is similarly guilty.
As such, it's a valid form of protest to pirate mp3s and DivX of songs and films created by companies which have taken from public domain IP but never contributed back. Real cybercrime involves matters more serious than trading mp3s privately rather than for profit.
Even more, I object to the notion in the paper referenced that it's a bad thing that "many countries do not share the urgency to combat cyber-crime for many reasons, including different values concerning piracy and espionage or the need to address more pressing social problems." That's one of the things I dislike most about the U.S.: cultural imperialism. The U.S. government has a tendency to try to push its own values and legal precepts onto other nations, and that's just plain wrong. Unless human rights are being violated in a very fundamental way, the U.S. has no right to attempt to coerce other countries into accepting our own cultural values.
For example, if a sovereign nation wants to adopt a policy which makes all IP public domain within a few years, that's the right of that nation to do so. Originally, copyrights in the U.S. lasted only 14 years. But instead the U.S. tries to put pressure on such countries, or else bribes them with "humanitarian" grants into accepting the U.S. position. Would we allow the largest corporation in the U.S. to bully all others into adopting particular strategies, dividing up markets, and bribing competitors into submission? No. So, why is the U.S. allowed to dictate its values to the rest of the world?
This is important because "cybercrime" as it's defined now in the U.S. includes matters which are legal in other nations, and the U.S. is attempting to pressure other nations into accepting U.S. offenses as international ones. Most of this pressure comes from the far right in this country, who are campaigning against pornography and recreational narcotics as well as trying to extend corporate hegemony.
One of the prime examples is the U.S. characterization of the Netherlands as being the largest producer of child pornography and a major point of interest in drug trafficking. Since the Reagan-Meese morality policing of the 80s, The Netherlands has been in FBI reports as the largest producer of child pornography, because the age of consent for porn in The Netherlands is 16 rather than 18. Rather skewed to call that child pornography, merely because cultural attitudes toward sex are more permissive in one country than in the most puritanical one on the planet. Also, The Netherlands actually has very strict controls placed on marijuana, which is legal to purchase in certain locales even though it's not legally easily exportable or even transportable within the country itself. That's similarly no reason for FBI reports to classify The Netherlands as a notable place for drug trafficking.
The Netherlands was replaced by Japan in FBI reports on cybercrime as the largest producer of child pornography, despite the fact that once again a cultural difference comes into play. Japan has never suffered the same sexual repression/oppression that some Western nations such as the U.S. have suffered, due to huge religious and cultural differences, hance the age of consent for pornography was lower than 18. The U.S. applied economic and political pressure to force the sovereign nation of Japan to raise its own internal age of consent for pornography production, which regardless of one's own attitudes towards sex or pornography is an inappropriate thing for one nation to do to another. Japan happily has no stigma attached to sex, and no Puritanical expectation of chastity until marriage. To include what is legal in its own nation and hosted in its own nation in cybercrime statistics is both cylturally imperialistic and dishonest.
This hasn't even touched upon the Chinese attitudes toward piracy of music and film, which would never be allowed by the U.S. to continue were it not for the fact that China is one of the most powerful nations. Were it a small, average country, the U.S. would have pressured them and economically blackmailed or bribed them already to buy into U.S. cultural values on the subject.
While the paper's details about various cracking exploits and their relationships with applicable federal laws is informative, I find its nonchalant inclusion of software piracy together with extortion and money laundering and fraud to be laughable, and its comments about laws which diverge in other countries from U.S. law to be downright offensive. It's extremely selfish and culturally imperialistic to assume that American ways are right and any others are wrong and still to be considered illegal even when permitted in the country in question. And anyone who wants to know why I harped on the differing definition of child pornography in the U.S. and in other nations, it's because the FBI likes to artificially inflate those figures in order to make the threat appear more significant than it is, in order to secure more of our tax dollars and to get away with more abuses of civil rights--after all, when anyone mentions children people start being emotional instead of rational. More about that here at this link.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*