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Appropriate Punishment For Crackers?
Cally writes "There's a Kevin Poulson article on SecurityFocus reporting that the US Sentencing Commission is seeking opinions about the appropriate punishment for convicted system crackers and other black-hat types. On one hand, it seems absurd to ruin the entire life of a foolish 15 year-old for committing the equivalent of graffiti. Then again, perhaps these people are cyber-terrorists who should be illegally imprisoned, indefinitely, without a trial, charges, or legal representation? You choose."
As a general rule you can only use leathal force if you believe your life is in danger. If someone breaks into your home then it is usually pretty easy to persuade a jury that you were in fear for your life. If someone cracks your security then I think it would be pretty hard.
If you Break into a website and vandalize it you already have laws to deal with that... if you break into a website and STEAL confidential information we already have theft laws for that.
why we have to treat it any different than in the real world I dont understand...
if a bunch of no-brain-punks smash in the front doors of saxs 5th ave. and spraypainted all over the interior... there are a nice set of laws in place to nail the little idiot bastards.. the same happens when you B&E a website and put your no-skills drivel in place of index.html.. and the same laws need to apply.
the hard part is when the punk is in Guana and the website that was vandalized is in Alaska.. how do you prosecute the little turd without acting like a global government enforcer?
if it happens in your state with a victim and victimizer in the same state... it's easy to prosecute... but 90% of these cases are never that way.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Actually, we're a Republic.
True, in a real democracy every person would have a say in every decision made by the government, but this only works in classrooms. Even in classrooms it doesn't work well, so we elect leaders who make decisions. If you don't like the decisions, either become an elected leader and change it, or just vote for someone else the next time around.
Despite what you may have learned from playing Civilization, Democracy and Republic are not mutually exclusive forms of government. You imply that the difference is in what people vote on (just picking leaders vs voting on every issue), but that's not true. A system where you pick a representative to act as your local proxy is a republic, but it can still be a democracy or not depending on how that representative is picked. Consider, a system like the Roman Empire had was a republic but not a democracy. There was a senate, but the members of the senate were chosen only by those with signifigant money, and even then only by those who's money was invested in land ownwership, not other forms of wealth. It was not a general election of the masses. The difference between a democratic republic and a non-democratic republic is in how the population is involved in the process of picking the representatives. What you are thinking of - a system without any representatives at all where every issue is voted on by the whole population, is called a DIRECT democracy, which is just one of many forms of democracy.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.