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Hackers are 'Terrorists' Under Ashcroft's New Act
Carlos writes "Most computer crimes are considered acts of terrorism under John Ashcroft's proposed 'Anti-Terrorism Act,' according to this story on SecurityFocus. The Act would abolish the statute of limitations for computer crime, retroactively, force convicted hackers to give the government DNA samples for a special federal database, and increase the maximum sentence for computer intrusion to life in prison. Harboring or providing advice to a hacker would be terrorism as well. This is on top of the expanded surveillance powers already reported on. The bill could be passed as early as this week. I feel safer already."
here in the U.S. the punishment is supposed to fit the crime. i can't think of any other nonviolent, arguably victimless crime that carries no statute of limitations and can get you life in prison.
Why in the world would they need DNA. I am pretty sure that no where in the specs for DNS or IPv4 is it required that my genome sequence be part of the string being sent out.
So, who wants to take bets that the RIAA get's copyright violaters termed as hackers?
Papa Legba come and open the gate
Ok, computer crime should be crime.
But crime punishable by life in prison? With no statute of limitations? Doesn't murder have no statute of limitations and get you life?
There's a difference between 'crime is crime' and having some sense of proportion. geez.
This is a perversion of what Ashcroft requested. Hackers who attempt to disrupt key systems that are vital to protecting human life, for example the FAA's radar systems, are terrorists. And they are.
-- "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
Break into their computer, and you're instantly labelled a terrorist. Think there's any chance you'll get much less than the maximum penalty of life? Hell, my high school once informally accused me of piracy (which, incidentally, I was not guilty of) just on the basis that I knew enough and therefore could have done it. If there's anything that makes people paranoid, it's hearing that the Big Bad Hacker is right outside their computer's door.
Fair, no?
All those that detect and report security flaws in systems are terrorists because they comunicate these details to the Crackers (accidentally, but what does that have to do with it?).
Bummer...
-- Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
"If you have programming skills, get the fuck out of the States and take your skills with you. Your country obviously doesn't want you anymore."
(Am I now a felon?)
How about growing marijuana?
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
It will be interesting to see how soon all religion is stomped out because of a few off the wall psycho's who think that random acts of death and destruction without announcing intent to do so is a good thing for their religion. At that point, God be merciful to us all...
Is intrusion necessarily terrorism? If I break into the DMV computer system and replace their web page with something silly, that is certainly criminal, but it's more like vandalism than terrorism. Besides, wouldn't you be a traitor and not a terrorist even if these things did apply?
Also, does this mean that we no longer need virus programs and firewalls? I mean, who needs to lock their door when burglary is illegal?
And of course, how does this bode for tech workers? I often have to gain access to a customer's servers. Does this mean a simple "here's some credentials for you to use" is no longer enough? Do I have to have the admin at the customer's site file a contract with his boss and have his boss and himself and myself sign it each and every time I help them out, even if I'm just entering to check their logs because -- hey -- someone might later say it was unauthorized?
Ashcroft can suck my cock -- but we all know these things will be passed. And projects like mozilla.org that have sections on "hacking the code" will become villified for contributing to terrorism. Welcome to the witch-hunts; i'm finding a new line of fucking work.
Agreed, people who steal credit card numbers are bad and should be punished. But this law makes no distinction between cracking into a big ass server and stealing credit cards and cracking into a tiny ass server to write your name on the home page.
You wouldn't think it was fair to sentence someone who scrawled "Kilroy wuz here '01" on the bathroom wall of a pizza parlor to life in prison, would you? Because that's what this law states: Scrawl your name on any website without the author's permission and be punished as if you were Osama bin Laden's personal hackmeister.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Basically, if this were to be passed, it would tell the public that cracking/hacking is considered to be worse than murder. They even go so far as to say that giving advice to a cracker/hacker can yield life in prison! Is it just me, or is something seriously wrong here? I could go off and murder somone and receive less of a punishment than someone who defaced a website, resulting in a few hours of repairs by the administrator and the fixing of a securty hole. I'm sorry, but that's just not right.
You are talking about the same country in which courts upheld the expulsion of a six year old boy from an east coast school because he kissed a girl on the cheek? After all, a no tolerance policy is a no tolerance policy.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
So what exactly IS hacking according to the ATA?(how ironic, it's a acrynoum, for a computer term) Seriously, how long before the DCMA is included in this? Will I face federal prosecution for telling a friend about gnutella because the program can be used for illegal stuff? Could CmdrTaco and CowboyNeal be dragged from their homes at 6 in the morning and sent to jail because Slashdot had posted a story that talks about the Microsoft security problem of the week, since that could be concieved as giving advice to hackers? I am writing my senators about this asking them to reject the overly broad terms of the ATA and computer 'hacking'. I hope a number of you do the same.
-Henry
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
Crime is crime, yes, but the punishment should fit the crime. Adding a few words to a web page as a publicity stunt should not be punished in the same manner as multiple homicide, or armed robbery, or collaborating on a terrorist attack.
I suppose you'd feel comfortable in a society where the judicial system lopped off criminal's bodyparts, as well? Or caned you silly? No thank you. As it is, I think prison should be for VIOLENT OFFENDERS ONLY. There are many ways to pass a sentence on non-violent offenders, without prison, and without impacting society in such a heavy-handed legal and financial way.
--ksw2
Stop the damned civil rights whining
Why? Whining is about the only right we'll have left if Ashcroft gets his way.
Any crime is bad
Wrong. The 'American Revolution' was against the law.
Do you think it was bad?
while it is law you must obey it
Wrong. I don't have to do anything. I can pee in my neighbors gas tank, I can kick his dog, I can fill cans of Starkist tuna with lye and return them to the shelf at the grocery store, I can steal lollipops from small children, I can burn the flag, I can buy a AR-15 rifle with scope and sit on top of 75 Wall Street and gun down lawyers as the come to work.
I just have to deal with the consequences when I am done.
As for the consequences of the DMCA, well, fuck them. I don't seriously think the MPAA is going to sue me for copying Kenshin episodes to my hard drive so I can swap the DVD-ROM for the second battery. In 1940's Germany it was the law to round up and gas Jews. Am I supposed to sit idly by while people I know are killed?
Segregation used to be a law too. The point being that if you think a law is wrong, you try to get it changed. Y'know, civil disobedience, lobbying, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilence" and all that..
Theft of credit card information is already a crime. Why in the hell do we need a new crime to cover the old offense? The US Code is already too fucking big and convoluted as it is.
It's still stupid though.
The problem here isn't so much that they're saying that computer crime is illegal - more that the punishment is ridiculously severe. When deciding on a punishment, you have to decide what the aim of punishment is and how best to achieve that aim. In this case however, the law makers seem to have the aim of getting votes and the best method is to be tough on terrorism of any kind. It pulls at the heart strings of the nation so of course it gets votes.
Besides the political goals though, there are two main aims people have for utilising jail terms as punishment. The first is to remove the villian from society so that we can all forget about them and feel safe again - the death penalty is much more effective at achieving this aim so why not just use it? Some countries take this approach and it works, there is almost zero crime because people know if they commit a crime they are either executed or deported. The problem with this approach is twofold, firstly it expects everyone to lead a near perfect life and never make a mistake (think of how many teenagers commit once off offences to look cool and later learn from their mistakes and go on to be useful to society. The other problem is that eventually you punish the wrong guy and there's no way to set him free again.
The other aim for imprisonment is to teach people a lesson so they can rejoin society and live happily with everyone else again. Countries such as the US and Australia (and many others) with long jail terms don't acheive this goal at all well. The revolving door prison system is well known - most offenders wind up committing more crimes and going back into the system. However, countries which use shorter jail terms tend to have much lower crime rates. Instead of being locked up for 20 years and becoming bitter against society, you spend one or two years in a correctional facility where you are taught skills to help you survive in the world, go through drug rehabilitation if needed and work with councellors to deal with a disturbed past that may be haunting you. After that you have a much better chance of coming back out into society and not only abiding by the law, but also contributing to the community. If you think the cost of this approach is just too great, think about the cost of keeping people in prison for those extra 18 years and you'll find it works out a lot cheaper. It is not a 100% effective measure, some people will recommit and you need to have ways to deal with that - either through different methods of punishment or by longer imprisonments. It does however give criminals a chance to learn from their errors and adopt new skills to remove the temptation to recommit. After all, isn't that what punishment is all about?
It is the same problem people had with the outbreak of school violence. They immediately went to blame violent video games as the 'sole' cause. Also, take cell phones and automobile accidents for example. People blamed those, even though they are one of the smallest causes.
In essence, people look for the easiest thing to blame, which usually ends up being technology, since its 'new,' it must be the source of 'new' problems like terrorism, even though there is no true solution or source to blame for such occurances.
It is obvious that Phil Zimmerman by refusing to consider placing government back-doors in his PGP software is willfully aiding terrorist activity and thus based on this proposed legislation should be locked away for life for his crimes against civilized society.
Jon Johansen should immediately pack his bags and disappear to someplace like Argentina due to his work in the massively damaging DeCSS virus.
This is just absurd. Will it survive? Is it just FUD? What the fuck is happening in this world? Where to run? Where to hide? The only option would seem to be Antarctica.
OTOH, worms like Code Red and Nimda will rapidly continue to evolve and become more and more damaging and something very strong will have to be done at some point to check this exponential evolution of worms and distributed DoS attacks if we want the Internet to continue to exist.
--
$ chown -R us:us yourbase
What you're saying is that smart people like him, who sometimes use a little poor judgment, should be given life sentences in prison? You're saying that was Randall did is on the same level as murder?
The middle mind speaks!
Democracy is not a spectator sport. We have to get involved. Who do we write to? Who do we call? Who can we contact to see that this doesn't stand?
Oddly enough, according to the bill the deciding determiner of whether the unlawful act is a terrorist act is whether or not it was done for financial gain. So hacking a DB of credit card info ISN'T a terrorist act, while snooping around because you want to learn something IS.
I'm sure that violation of the DMCA will be covered under this act soon, as well...
That is all.
As David Quinn put it quite eloquently: Quite depressing, really. (The whole text can be found here, BTW)
But what can you expect when the whole world has bought into the idea that there is absolutely nothing that any one person can do to change things?
-- Shamus
Bleah!
First they came for the virus writers, and I did not speak out, because I was not a virus writer.
Then they came for the the worm writers, and I did not speak out, because I was not a worm writer.
Then they came for the crackers, and I did not speak out, because I was not a cracker.
Then they came for the copyright infringers, and I did not speak out, because I was not a copyright infringer.
Then they came for the encryption users, and I did not speak out, because I was not an encryption user.
Then they came for me, and by then there was no one left to speak out for me.
Both are cases of Vandalism or even maybe destruction of public property because it is on the VERY PUBLIC NET. The only mitigating factor is the cost of the damage and clean-up. Why don't we enforce the laws we have, instead of pushing for new foolish ones ? Easy, because no Politician will get KUDOS for enforcing old legislation, but they will get BIG PUBLICITY for enacting new legislation in the current climate...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
> Say someone hax0rs an air traffic
> control system, do they deserve life
> imprisonment?
Yes, they do. For attempted murder, not for
computer crime. They should be tried and executed
or imprisoned for the crime, not for the means.
If we raise the computer crime to the level of a
capital offense, we DIMINISH the meaning of the
capital offenses we already have.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Whistleblower protection with real teeth would be more effective in cleaning up inept government agencies. So would giving the federal Inspectors General the power to fire Federal employees. But no, Ashcroft's not asking for that.
...until some other crime is committed, there was no victim of simply stealing the numbers.
And if I drive home drunk and get away with it, what's the harm?
I read an interesting statistic the other day, in the UK there's about £270,000,000 of credit-card fraud a year, of which only £7,000,000 happens without someone physically presenting a card in a shop - i.e. that 7 mil includes not just all the internet fraud but all the stuff on the telephone as well.
Of course this is all well known. Best way to hack into a network? Get a job there as a Janitor and find a computer that wasn't logged out of.
Anyhow, criminal Laws can be divided into two categories, I've always though:
Laws that prohibit things that are bad.
Laws that might make it easier to enforce the former laws.
So, killing people is bad, so it's illegal.
Owning a gun isn't bad, but making that illegal is believed to make it easier to enforce the killing people law.
Copyright theft is bad. Being able to back-up an acrobat document isn't bad, and in Russia is actually a right, but DCMA is supposed ot mkae it easier to enforce the "no stealing copyright materials" law.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Actually, I believe that the large numbers of people in prison is a direct result of the "War on Drugs".
If you look into those statistics you've quoted, I'm sure you'll notice that the largest proportion of inmates is in prison for NON-violent crimes. Specifically drug related. The current insanity has lead to pot smokers getting minimum 20 year sentences while killing someone while you were drunk driving may get you probation.
Obviously people have forgotten the lessons learned under prohibition. You remember that one don't you? We made alcohol illegal, even passed a constitutional amendment. What happened? Grandmothers became criminals, prison populations went up, and we provided the funding for the Mafia. We had to pass another constitutional amendment to undo the one we passed to make alcohol legal again.
Parallels anyone? How about pot, cocaine, etc. being illegal. Otherwise law abiding citizens are now criminals, prison populations going up, and we are funding the "Triads", "Columbia drug cartels", "Yakuza", "Jamaican posies", maybe even the "Mafia"
Now that we are treating "intellectual property" as real property, (Hint: it isn't) reading, writing, copying, learning are now criminal activities. Even more otherwise law-abiding citizens will be criminals, prison populations will grow even faster, life will generally suck more.
Oh, and I don't think that the "weapons manufactureres"[sic] have too much control. I don't think they have anything to do with it. If you gave every man and woman in the country a gun, I don't think that the murder rate would go up any, who knows, it along with other crimes might even go down.
Murder, theft, rape, physical property destruction, etc. should be crimes. Prostitution, gambling, smoking (tobacco, pot, etc.), doing other drugs (alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy), "intellectual property" misuse (if that's possible) shouldn't be.
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)