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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."
If I'm the accused, I want a nice short probation...if someone cracking my website, then I want 'em hung, drawn and quartered...
Hacking a website is much more than graffiti. If you spraypaint the outside of wal-mart, people can still go in and shop. If you hack walmart.com and replace it with "shout outz" then wal-mart will probably lose hundreds of sales per hour to their competitors. That is very real money to these businesses. Hacking (cracking is breaking copy-protection) a website should not have the same punishment as violent crime, but it is definitely a more severe crime than graffiti, and deserves a much harsher punishment.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I wanna know something. If someone (attempts to) breaks into your home (in the USA), you are allowed to shoot that person in self defense. Are you likewise allowed to take out anyone attacking your network?
Stop the brainwash
Cyber-crime is no different to ordinary crime. If the 15 year old 'cracker' writes his name all over a site (i.e. graffiti) he should get the same as a 15 year-old who scrawls all over his local shopping mall (i.e. fuck all or a safari or something).
If however he goes and steals 10000 credit card numbers and uses them to buy every back issue of playboy he should be locked up for a long time. With lubricant.
How about referencing recent hacker cases, and the sentences that were imposed. How about some information on the ages of the black-hatters. No, that would be relevant to the discussion...
Murder ... life in prison or death (by state)
... 10 years
... 5 years
... 3 years ( -1 year for good behavior)
... 6 months - 2 years
... 20 years?????
... especially when the damage can easily be undone with last night's tape backup within an hour or two in most cases ....
... and take a little more responsibility for their Internet presence .... they spend tons of money on swipe cards, cameras, etc .... why should the think they are going to do less on the Internet???
... everyone else pretty much says "SHIT! ... then stomps their feet for a few minutes, laughes when they discover how the hacker got in, then rebuilds their system or patches it, and then moves on with life ...
...
Grand theft auto
Assult and battery
Theft
Throwing eggs or spray painting a building
Hacking a computer a defacing a web site
Does that make sence????
I don't want to encourage people to commit cyber crimes, but it seems as though our society's values are a little out of whack
Perhaps some of these coorporations that are so worried about this kind of stuff shold place a little more of the blame on themselves
BTW: I am pointing at the corps. because it is their lobbiests that are pushing for these rediculous sentences for cyber crimes
Just my $0.02 cents
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
I'm not sure why you need new sentencing guidelines for old crimes (theft, extortion, fraud, embezelment, etc...) committed using new technology. Why is a crime different because a computer is involved?
$G
-- $G
Personally I think we should take a page from Singapore's book and explore the latest options in caning. Nothing drives a lesson in ethics home more quickly than being beaten severely with a bamboo stick by a martial arts master. I would also view caning as an appropriate remedy for spammers violating anti-spam laws, telemarketers ignoring do-not-call lists, as part of a comprehensive package for the last round of fraud-perpitrating corporate CEOs and companies who file frivolous patent lawsuits based on laughable patents.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Coming from a person who has both an interest in network security (me) and graffiti (again, me), I have to point out that graffiti and network intrusion don't really overlap and here is why:
When a person writes on a wall (or a "reach"), the owner of the shop might show up and go, "oh crap" and they might very well pay someone a few bucks to cover it up or perhaps do it themselves. The artists' intention is clear -- to throw up some paint and that's it. The paint isn't going to seep into the wall and ruin everything inside, however. It isn't going to pick up the cash register and run off. It isn't going to take every customer's credit information.
When someone breaks into a system -- regardless of their motivations -- the breakee does not know what the intruder has in mind. Maybe it is benign, maybe it isn't, but there is no room to "let it slide." It must be treated as a malicious attack and thus computers must be shut down, customers/students lose services, huge costs in time and effort can and will be expended to purge the system of the problem which often involves what might very well be overkill -- like reinstalling a system or a number of systems because you Don't Know and you can't afford to leave loose ends.
Graffiti and network intrusion would be analagous if and only if graffiti caused the same sort of response. It doesn't.
And in case you're curious as to why I'd be into graf, check out these sites.
My
Limekiller
Ignoring for the moment the practicalities of killing somebody over the Internet(!?), doesn't the USA already have murder/manslaughter laws? Why does there need to be special legislation depending on the method employed? Do you have special laws for murder with a knife; with a gun; with a mango?
I'm sure I'll never understand this. In the UK recently, there was a big hoo-ha in the tabloids about the need for "special laws" governing journalistic integrity for material published on the Internet. Why? There are already defamation laws.
Having the punishment be the same as in the physical world will eliminate a lot of "Waah, it's not fair, look what they did to the poor 15 year old kid." It will take a lot of people to convince me that breaking into a computer and stealing personnel records is somehow less of a crime than different from breaking into a building and stealing the paper equivalents. By the same token, if a kid thinks it's not ok to spray-paint an office building, but it is ok to deface a website, well, then, that's a pretty stupid kid.
Of course, this is not a black and white issue. In the real world, spray painting a building can be done without breaking and entering. In the electronic world, that's usually not the case - the cracker must break into the system to deface the web page. (Unless, of course, the site has some sort of CGI-based web page update feature with no password set, but that's not too common I bet). Maybe we could make them do something useful, like 200 hours of community service. Or maybe we could have them write the following 1000 times: "L33t haxx0rs are actually dateless retards who, despite their bragging, don't actually drink beer or get pussy."
Short of the defacement of a website, everything else is analagous to real life. Whether you smash a window and steal a file cabinet, or use a root exploit and tar up some data, you're doing the same thing. And since you'll get the same punishment, you'll get (hopefully) thrown in jail for 2-3 years for breaking and entering. This means you'll have a big biker dude named Ripper for your roomate, and they find out that you did your "breaking and entering" not by using a baseball bat, but rather by sitting in front of a computer drinking Mountain Dew and eating day-old pizza, what they'll do to you will be much more punishment than what the government could ever do to you.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
The Amnesty "illegally imprisoned" link reguards a pare-military group as common burgulars, the Rense.com link invents another class. Both have been addressed by the US courts and neither is addressed in Kevin Poulsen's article.
All that aside, hell no a non-violent criminal should not be locked up. Some other punishment is much more appropriate, like restitution of *real* losses (no making the defendant buy a new security team) and community service, etc.
Jail *should* be for the people that are a physical threat to society, not a theoretical or financial one.
Before the thread runs off the topic, see my website for my position on the death penalty before assigning one to me.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Make them do 1st level phone support for an AOL for a few hundred hours, that will teach them ...
Here's a story about a man who kidnapped, tortured and abused a girl then tried to kill her by injecting her with bleach. His sentence? 10 years - he'll be out in half that time.
Sure, give crackers jail time but make it appropriate for the crime. Maybe 3 months in jail, or probation. When I see someone like Kevin Mitnick get 7 years, and violent criminals who, in my opinion, should never be allowed out of prison get the same sentences, it pisses me off.
The thing is with the widespread of software and the internet and technology in general always brings in a high punishment. I think it comes down to you doing whats right. Now I am guessing if most of you see a car with the keys in the ignition you aren't going to hop in and steal it, but if you saw a website with a big vunrability more of you may be inclined to take advantage of the situation. I think the point that doesn't come home to a lot of people is computers are a part of everyone's lives now, and if we don't respect them, we will be punished.
But in general, technologists have always been risky with the law. If I created a nuclear device for the sake of doing it, even though I have good intentions and no feelings of using it, I would probably be jailed for a LONG time.
Hack Microsoft? Rewards and adulation...
Hack me? Nail the fucker to a tree...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
The Internet's Achilie's heel is it's awesome complexity and size. The result is that it's very east for a group to appear, do damage, and then disappear, and never be traced. Worse still, the ease with which this can be done is itself an incentive - a downtime of DNS, or of a Microsoft server, or of Yahoo, is seen as unimportant, easy, and untracable, and people - for whatever reasons, be they sociopathic, vengeful, curious, or egocentric - are attracted to perform these kinds of acts.
It's difficult for any reasonable person to know where to begin solving these issues. Traditionally, nailing down machines and networks so they are more secure has been seen as the best approach, but there's little anyone can do about having bandwidth used up by unaccountable "hacked" machines, as is seemingly more and more the modus-operandi.
Attempts to trace crackers are frequently wastes of time, and stiffer penalties for hackers are compromised by the fact that it's hard to actually catch the hackers in the first place. The situation is made worse that many of the most destructive hackers do not, themselves, set up anything beyond sets of scripts distributed to and run by suckers - so-called "script kiddies".
Given that hackers usually work by taking over other machines and coopting them into damaging clusters that can cause all manner of problems, less focus than you'd expect is put onto making machines secure in the first place. The responsibility for putting a computer on the Internet is that of a system administrator, but frequently system administrators are incompetent, and will happily leave computers hooked up to the Internet without ensuring that they're "good Internet citizens". Bugs are left unpatched, if the system administrators have even taken the trouble to discover if there are any problems in the first place. This is, in some ways, the equivalent of leaving an open gun in the middle of a street - even the most pro-gun advocates would argue that such an act would be dangerously incompetent. But putting a farm of servers on the Internet, and ignoring security issues completely, has become a widespread disease.
There is a solution, and that's to make system adminstrators responsible for their own computers. An administrator should be assumed, by default, to be responsible for any damage caused by hardware under his or her control unless it can be shown that there's little the admin could reasonably have done to prevent their machine from being hijacked. Clearly, a server unpatched a few days after a bug report, or a compromise unpatched that has never been publically documented, is not the fault of an admin, but leaving a server unpatched years after a compromise has been documented and patches have been available certainly is. Unlike hackers, it is easy to discover who is responsible for a compromised computer system. So issues of accountability are not a problem here.
Couple this with suitably harsh punishments, and not only will system administrators think twice before, say, leaving IIS 4 out in the wild vulnerable to NIMDA, but hackers too - for the same reasons as they avoid attacking hospital systems, etc - will think twice about compromising someone else's system. Fines for first offenses and very minor breaches can be followed by bigger deterents. If you were going to release a DoS attack into the wild, but knew that the result would be that many, many, system administrators would be physically castrated because of your actions, would you still do it?
Of course not. But even if you were, the fact that someone has been willing to allow their system to be used to close the DNS system, or take Yahoo offline, ought to be reason enough to be willing to consider such drastic remedies. Castration may sound harsh, but compared to modern American prison conditions, it's a relatively minor penalty for the system administrator to pay, and will merely result in discomfort combined with removal from the gene-pool. At the same time, such an experience will ensure that they take better care of their systems in future, without removing someone who might have skills critical to their employer's well being from being taken out of the job market.
The assumption has always been made that incompetent system administrators deserve no blame when their systems are hijacked and used for evil. This assumption has to change, and we must be willing to force this epidemic of bad administration to be resolved. Only by securing the systems of the Internet can we achieve a secure Internet. Only by making the consequences of hacking real and brutal can we create an adequate response to the notion that hacking, per-se, is not wrong, that it causes no damage.
This quagmire of people considering system administrators the innocents in computer security when they are themselves the most responsible for problems and holes will not disappear by itself. Unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Write also to Jack Valenti [mpaa.org], the CEO and chair of the MPAA, whose address and telephone number can be found at the About the MPAA page. Write too to Bill Gates, Chief of Technologies and thus in overall charge of security systems built into operating systems like Windows NT, at Microsoft. Tell them security is an important issue, and is being compromised by a failure to make those responsible for security accountable for their failures. Tell them that only by real, brutal, justice meted out to those who are irresponsible on the Internet will hacking be dealt with. Tell them that you believe it is a reasonable response to hacking to ensure that administrators who fail time and time again are castrated, and that castration is a reasonable punishment that will ensure a minimal impact on an administrator's employer while serving as a huge deterent against hackers and against incompetence. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done to patch servers by competent administrators but that if incompetent admins are not kept accountable, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how poor security harms all three. Let your legislators know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies concerning maladministration of computer systems connected to the public Internet.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
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.
Illegal imprisonment? Nay, for they did pass laws allowing indefinite detainment. It is merely unconstitutional
I still don't understand why we need some kind of special legislation for the so called "cyber crime." Don't the states already have laws punishing crimes of trespassing and/or fraud?
Bush Lies Watch
A crime is a crime is a crime. Aren't there plenty of existing standards to base this on? Tie it to the harm done. Some will be misdemeanors, some will be felonies. If some 'graffiitti' splattered over a commercial site causes a relatively small financial loss, call it a misdemeanor and sentence accordingly. If the financial loss is large enough, call it a felony and give an appropriate sentence. E.g., defacing the brochure page of your local shoe store might cause them little or no measurable loss of revenue and be repairable within a single work day. Doing the same thing to Amazon or Yahoo is a different matter and calls for a much stronger sentence.
The important thing is to prevent and punish people who act criminally, and to counter the popular impression that many "geeks" don't take the issue seriously.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
An international corporate website with a secure ordering component is slightly more complicated than "Insert tape, click Restore". There are distributed database servers that need to be examined, several web servers with load balancers in multiple geographically diverse locations, they need to investigate all involved servers and networking components to determine the possibility of a back door; and on top of all this, they have to leave the 'crime scene' untarnished so that security experts can determine a) how they got in, and b) how to prevent them from doing it again.
We're not just talking about somebody editing index.html here. Restoring from tape/CD-R may work for your home vanity domain website, but it falls slightly short in the real world.
I'd also like to echo the sentiments made by other posters;
As usual, the vast majority of analogies posted are flagrantly off-key, so I'll pose one; Breaking into a web server and defacing the content is like breaking into a webserver and defacing the content. Come on, people, we're a technical group and should be able to talk about these incidents without resorting to brick wall, spray paint, bomb-threats, or other wild analogies.
These crimes should be treated in context, and the lawmakers should be told, repeatedly, that the Internet is not a direct analogy to real life. Servers are not brick and mortar establishments. Components of a website do not have to physically reside in the same country, letalone the same building.
When a person violates a website, they shuold be charged as such. The more intricate and harmful their intrusion, the more harsh the punishment. They should be given rehabilitative sentences including community service if they're young, or prison time if they're age of majority.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Bring charges appropriately. Note that you might need to legislate to clarify the scale of the offense in the new setting. As others have already pointed out, defacing a web site in a way that stops it being usable is not just graffiti, it's (probably) nearer breaking and entering followed by deliberate (albeit relatively easily repaired) vandalism.
This can affect charges and sentencing.
If yes, charge those people, too.
On one hand, it seems absurd to ruin the entire life of a foolish 15 year-old for committing the equivalent of graffiti
More like breaking into your office to erase every whiteboard in the place and replace them with poorly spelled tags, changing the locks, or jus took the door off it's hinges, smashing the alarm system, and taking/destroying the gods know what else in the process.
Hacking a website doesn't just mean that the site was changed. Anyone with a lick of sense after an intrusion needs to take a hell of a lot of time and take stock of what they still have, what they might have copied or deleted, and if they left any backdoors so they could get back in and have their little fun. Calling is "just graffiti" shows a complete lack of understanding of information security. There is real damage done when someone "just" defaces a website. It can't just be painted over.
Banks have safes and armored cars for pragmatic reasons, not legal ones. It is just as illegal to take $100,000 from a shopping cart as it is from an armored car. On a practical level, it is obviously safer in the armored car.
The responsibility you indicate mention is real, but it is the responsibility to the shareholders. If a bank transports money in a shopping cart and it's stolen, the thieves will go to jail. The directors who authorized the insecure transport will probably be fired, and might be sued by shareholders.
Crackers should go to jail. Incompetent admins should be fired. These are two separate problems.
Why do all the lawyers insist on creating new versions of every law and crime just because they happen to occur in the "digital" realm?
Let's see... hax0r kid defaces web-site.
1. Trespassing.
2. Breaking-and-Entering.
3. (possible) malicious destruction of private property.
If someone logs into your (wide-open, no password root shell) server without your permission, that's trespass.
If someone hacks your server to get in, that's trespass and breaking-and-entering.
If someone changes your web-site, etc., while they're there... that's destruction of property.
There are already well-established laws to deal with these crimes, and those laws have ranges of punishments appropriate for the severity of the offense. Why should special "digital" versions be created when existing laws already work?
This country needs fewer laws, and better enforcement of the ones it already has. More laws simply make more money for lawyers, and more loopholes for the rich and powerful.
Well I think white folks should get the same sentences as minorities commiting the same crime. What makes you think that honkeys have the-
Wait... what are we talking about again?
What is music when you despise all sound?
"Incompetent admins should be fired."
Would it not be a little more imaginative to offer them some sort of training?
The mildest is the person who breaks into a system, just because he can. He (or she, after all) breaks in, looks around, and leaves before doing any damage, changing anything, or "taking" anything. It doesn't impact any services that the target is providing. True, after any break-in that is discovered, the admins of the site will spend time cleaning it up and making it more secure. And I wouldn't like it if someone broke into my house just to look around. But I don't think that the punishment should be too harsh in this case, perhaps on the same scale as graffiti, maybe a little harsher because of the more expensive "cleanup".
The worst case is the cracker who breaks into a system to destroy or deface it. He changes the way external sites look and destroys information that is vital to those systems and may not be able to be rebuilt. Even a DoS could fall into this category if it leaves the site offline long enough, and is clearly deliberate. These guys should get harsher sentences, both for the public nature of their crime and the potential for data to be lost without hope of recovery.
The middle case is the cracker who breaks into a site and doesn't change anything, but just copies information from the site. In this case, the nature of the information itself and the mindset of the cracker must be taken into account. If the information was something that the cracker would have no way of using, and doesn't pass it on, then that would fall under the "curiosity" end of the spectrum. If the information was something that the hacker could directly use or sell, like credit card numbers or confidential documents sold to competitors, that would fall under the "malicious" end of the spectrum and be punished more harshly. I don't think the cracker should have to actually use the data to qualify for harsher punishment, as long as he had plans to use it. Notice that in this case, it is not necessarily the object that is copied that dictates the severity, it is the cracker's intentions.
The main problem with the way computer crime is punished right now is that whenever an item is copied/stolen, there is the tendency to assign the highest possible value to that item, without taking what the cracker plans on doing with it into account. After all, a confidential document could be worth lots of money to the company it is taken from. But nobody takes the capabilities and intent of the cracker into question; if he doesn't know how to capitalize on the value of the document, how could he be liable for "stealing" that much value?
Yes, I know that someone who steals jewelery in real life and then hocks it for a tenth of its value still stole the jewelery, not 1/10th of it. But when physical objects are stolen, the victim doesn't possess it anymore. When documents are "stolen" but not deleted, the victim still has access to it. Therefore, I think it is proper to assign the "value" of the theft to be how much the value of the document is reduced, not the value of the document itself. And if the cracker doesn't know how to use the document or who to sell it to, how can its value be reduced?
Your entire argument seems to depend on legally defining computers as dangerous weapons as opposed to tools.
Tools are unregulated and the owner is not responsible if someone steals their tool and uses it in a crime. If I leave a shovel leaning against the side of my house and someone takes it and uses it to kill someone, I am not legally responsible. Even if I knew that risk existed when I failed to secure the tool.
Guns are regulated and the owners are (somewhat) responsible for the actions taken with them, even by others and even without the owner's permission or knowledge. However, the owner is never held fully responsible for the actions of the person who took and used their gun. And the level of responsibility is negligible unless bodily injury results and there was a minor who has legitimate access to the premises involved.
Somehow, I don't think anyone is going to agree to classify computers as deadly weapons and make the penalties for their unauthorized use greater than those for the unauthorized use of firearms.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
It seems that this is going too far. Well I may agree that certains activities related to cracking should be punished. People and comapnies not only loose money but also precious information and reputation. Some cracks may lead to more serious situations when we may have not only material but also personal losses.
But creating an environment where cracking itself is utterly ilegal is the most stupid thing one can think of. First because it will create a situation similar to America in the 20's-30's where nearly all alcohol production was outlawed. By making cracking illegal, one will not stop it but feed the criminal hordes with experienced people and tool experts. What will come out of that is unpredictable. The future cyber-Scarface will not only stop by Chicago and not only restrict his doings in the waters of the Great Lakes.
Besides, making cracking wholly illegal will not give ground to capitalism. It will be the best show of feudalism in modern times, as all "good-netizens" will be utterly dependent of the wills and whishes of a bunch of corporations who will care or discare for the their security and/or privacy.
Also it will be a violation of our freedom. I can check up the engine of my car. I can try to fix my washing machine. I have the right to change a light bulb in my living room. But I have to go to jail because some jerk locked up any interactivity of his program with any other system and I need that for my everyday's needs?
The punishment should be in accordance to the damage they caused, and if they stole or hurt anyone.
I believe that the penalties for merely defacing a website, or cracking into a machine and not actually doing much damage or "stealing" anything should be light. Sure, it is annoying, but it isn't that major.
If someone cracks into a database server and steals credit card information, that is another thing altogether. They should be charged with theft of credit cards (or whatever the actual crime is).
If someone (hypothetically) manages to crack into a computer that controls air traffic radar, and planes end up crashing because of it, they should be locked away for mass murder.
Some of the proposed punishments for computer crimes are quite harsh, treating the perpetrator like a terrorist or violent criminal.
However, someone who simply defaces a web site and writes "I 0wn j00!" on it doesn't deserve to be given more time than a rapist.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Sorry if I am trolling a bit here.
In society we all have an expectation of privacy. That right is supported in common law.
For example if your neighbor puts up 15 ft solid brick fence and then sunbathes nude behind it and you put up a tower with a camera on it you can be arrested/sued for being a "peeping tom". A local TV station had an employee get busted for using the "skycam" weather camera to do just that. The courts held that the woman had a reasonable expectation of privacy and that it was violated by the man using the TV towers camera.
When someone puts up website they have a reasonable expectation that the back office parts of the site are to be private. Just because you CAN peer into the site (on into the backyard) doesn't mean you are allowed too!
The amount of effort required to circumvent them is irrelevant. The expectations still exist and are legally protected.
I don't consider break-ins, especially to insecure machines or business computers (but maybe I just value individuals more than businesses?), to be a very high crime.
That was the most stupid of your statements. Well I don't consider your dead-bolted door to be adequate security for your home. So by that logic I am free to break in and clean out the house. By God, you should have had a steel vaulted door.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Like many people, I don't want to see new laws created to cover every time someone uses a computer for some $CRIMINAL_ACTIVITY which was already illegal by itself.
However, there's a real limit to how far analogies can take you. We can't just say "it's like vandalism / theft / graffiti / spying / workplace disruption / copyright infringment" and expect applying the equivalent punishments to produce the best results for our society. There are ways that internet-based activities are completely unlike anything that's come before.
Lets focus on just one of the most important differences between "cyber-crimes" and the old-fashioned physical variety: it's now possible (and easy) for the victim and perpetrator to be in different jurisdictions when the offense is committed.
During the early popularization of the internet, most users were in the US (or its servant-states like the UK), so often enough the vic & perp were under the same set of laws. The FBI was able to haul in domestic hackers like of Cpt. Crunch, Bob Morris, Mitnick, and later Mafiaboy. (I think Jaegar was a notable exception)
But is arresting those guys really the best way to protect the US economy? The US government is using guns and handcuffs to protect US businesses' computers from tampering- can we expect that defense to remain viable in the future?
Physical force is not a lasting solution to an electronic threat
(It's like "security through obscurity"- it will work at first, and is easy to implement. But someday the enemies become experienced enough to circumvent that defense, and by then you need real protection)
Threat of arrest only works on perpetrators inside your jurisdiction. "Cyber-Crimes" can be performed by anyone with a PPP stack- which is everyplace with reliable electricity. The US has a powerful law-enforcement/military presence, and with extradition treaties can bump up their effective jurisdiction to cover a majority of the earth's landmass. (Although with reduced precision in the less-friendly or less-developed nations, or where local cops are too busy with violent crimes to go hunting down script-kiddies)
What about nations that are downright non-friendly?
If a Canadian teen can inflict billions of dollars of economic damage in 3 days (and only be caught after public bragging), what about government-sponsored agents in "The Axis of Evil"? Suppose China takes offense at "US imperialists", and assigned 200 CS PhDs to build innovative DOS strategies for e-commerce sites?
Unless we can rely on forming a durable "Pax Americana", with a single organization enforcing a uniform law code across the entire planet, there will always be places for hackers to hide beyond your reach. (The Bush administration wants to create such an empire, but they will fail.)
I would argue that so-called "cyber-terrorism" hasn't happened yet, and will never be a major concern (the small number of computer-operated systems capable of producing enough violent damage to evoke "terror" will be heavily protected, with much redundancy and human oversight).
But "cyber-economic-warfare" is a real risk in next 20 years, and so far the US government has been allocating serious funds to make the problem worse when it starts to hit.
All of the FBI efforts to strongarm and incarcerate computer pranksters is just reducing our resisitance to the eventual onslaught. The government subsidizes insecure software by arresting people who break it, relieving the developers from fixing their own products. Microsoft might not publish such dangerously insecure systems if they faced the traditional punishments that the free market unleases on inferior products.
Let's privatize computer security! Save tax dollars, and increase effectiveness at the same time. We could reduce the penalty for "hacking" type crimes (or DOS) to the magnitude of a traffic ticket. (Teens cannot commit them with impunity, but companies can't rely on arresting offenders as their sole defense).
(Naturally, using "hacking" perform any real crime- unauthorized fund transfer for instance, or copyright infringment- should be punishable just like that crime by itself)
If you think that a woman deserves to be raped because she is wearing a low-cut top or her pants are little too tight, then you have some serious problems and should be taken out of society immediately.
No, I don't think anyone should be assaulted for what they wear. I don't think someone should be mugged either, just because their wallet or cellphone is in their hand. Hell, I've seen on the news people getting mugged for their shoes!
But I am aware, as you should be too, that that viewpoint isn't universal. There are streets in London I won't walk down while talking on my phone. In some parts of town, I'm careful not to show a wallet full of cash. These are just basic precautions that everyone should take. But it's taboo to say that dressing so as not to draw attention is one of the basic precautions, and that is a double standard.
If he/she is a minor, however, I think state of mind should have some sway over the consequences. You'd be surprised just how effective a simple visit by law enforcement personnel can be in "adjusting" the cracker's attitude.
In 1997 I was caught dorking around in school district systems. In my adolescent mind I thought it was all fun and games. Until I was hauled into a room by several very serious looking detectives and interrogated. Bad-cop-good-cop games, the whole works. This was quite possibly the fastest attitude readjustment I've ever experienced.
The detectives, I think, had some sympathy for my plight. His boss wanted to bust me hard and basically ruin my life. I was hauled before the head honcho (don't know exactly who he was or what his title was) and was given a stern lecture. I was asked if I'd ever used drugs or done anything violent. In the end, I was let go with 40 hours of community service to the school district and a warning to not get caught "so much as pinging" the district machines.
When my computer was returned to me from evidence, an entire year later, I found that the detective had upgraded the CPU and put 16 megs of RAM into it. I guess I made an impact on him, as well.
Now, on the other hand, if you've got a script kiddie, and he's whining and bitching and making life hard for investigators, and basically has a "fuck you copper" attitude, then I say... Bust him, throw him in the lockup, and let him think about how much of an asshole he is for a few months. Let him out, and if he does it again, hit him with the full force of adult penalties. Breaking-and-entering, defacement of property, theft of property, the whole works. Fuck up his life and let him figure out why it happened.
I was given a wonderful second chance, and I haven't wasted it. I was just being a stupid kid. People who scoff at the opportunities that law enforcement is trying to give them deserve prison.
Your sentiment is pleasantly honest and common to most people, though maybe not consciously or quite as extreme (for example, to be drawn and quartered after hanging is unnecessary :).
"The punishment should fit the crime." Equally important, someone neutral (not indifferent) should pick the punishment.
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However, few are aware that the federal judge actually has extremely little discretion in sentencing. In a nonviolent crime against strangers such as destructive hacking, setting aside criminal history, the amount of the losses essentially determines the sentence. Said damages are notoriously difficult to estimate and easy to inflate, as in the cases of Kevin Mitnick or Robert Morris, who were clearly culpable, but for what? State courts remain more flexible, but with the growth of federal law and the wire fraud aspect of computer crime, more cases are swept into federal court where the sentences are typically heavier.
Current federal sentencing guidelines, dating from Reagan era reforms designed to crack down on crime by constraining "soft" judges, and created by the Sentencing Commission, are purposefully wooden and mathematical in their determination of sentences. You literally add and subtract points based on different factors, then consult a chart to find the mandatory sentencing range. (In some cases, I think a minority, defendants do benefit from protection from excessively harsh sentences.) In certain drug cases, mere grams of a substance such as crack can add years to your sentence
At sentencing, the judge is given a presentencing report recommending a sentence plus or minus, say, 5% of a given fine or imprisonment or probation, a range from which it is very difficult to depart without breaking the law. What effectively happens -- and I hope this was foreseen -- is that sentencing authority is passed to prosecutor, whose decisions as to which offenses to charge or to drop, and amenability to plea agreements, set the outcome. If you believe the sentence unfair, it is the prosecutor or Congress, author of the ill-conceived guidelines, that needs influencing. The Guidelines long ago survived constitutional challenege.
I can tell you firsthand that many federal judges don't like the Guidelines, but if they depart from the prescribed sentences they are reversed on appeal.
Haven't you guys heard? Graffiti is dead. You're going to have to do your hacking with a keyboard from here on out.