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Death Penalty For Hackers?
EMIce writes "The New York Times Op-Ed page has a piece entitled Worse Than Death (Obnoxious but free registration required) that calls for harsher 'hacker' penalties as a deterrent, quoting one academic as recommending even well, the death penalty - as a deterrent for the likes of Sasser author Sven Jaschan. Let's face it, businesses are becoming more dependent on their computers but they continue to be a point of failure, and subsequently, frustration through lost profits. Perpetrated breakdowns are now pushing that aggravation towards an edge. The author suggests commuting the idea of a death sentence into a lifetime of servitude doing viral cleanup. What role should enforcement play in such cases and is this too harsh, even considering the billions in damage that is sometimes caused?"
http://www.bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.nytimes.c om
Last year a German teenager named Sven Jaschan released the Sasser worm, one of the costliest acts of sabotage in the history of the Internet. It crippled computers around the world, closing businesses, halting trains and grounding airplanes.
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Which of these punishments does he deserve?
A) A 21-month suspended sentence and 30 hours of community service.
B) Two years in prison.
C) A five-year ban on using computers.
D) Death.
E) Something worse.
If you answered A, you must be the German judge who gave him that sentence last week.
If you answered B or C, you're confusing him with other hackers who have been sent to prison and banned from using computers or the Internet. But those punishments don't seem to have deterred hackers like Mr. Jaschan from taking their place.
I'm tempted to say that the correct answer is D, and not just because of the man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives. I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are.
Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits.
The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes - one in 500 hackers - would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.
I see his logic, but I also see practical difficulties. For one thing, many hackers live in places where capital punishment is illegal. For another, most of them are teenage boys, a group that has never been known for fearing death. They're probably more afraid of going five years without computer games.
So that leaves us with E: something worse than death. Something that would approximate the millions of hours of tedium that hackers have inflicted on society.
Hackers are the Internet equivalent of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who didn't manage to hurt anyone on his airplane but has been annoying travelers ever since. When I join the line of passengers taking off their shoes at the airport, I get little satisfaction in thinking that the man responsible for this ritual is sitting somewhere by himself in a prison cell, probably with his shoes on.
He ought to spend his days within smelling range of all those socks at the airport. In an exclusive poll I once conducted among fellow passengers, I found that 80 percent favored forcing Mr. Reid to sit next to the metal detector, helping small children put their sneakers back on.
The remaining 20 percent in the poll (meaning one guy) said that wasn't harsh enough. He advocated requiring Mr. Reid to change the Odor-Eaters insoles of runners at the end of the New York City Marathon.
What would be the equivalent public service for Internet sociopaths? Maybe convicted spammers could be sentenced to community service testing all their own wares. The number of organ-enlargement offers would decline if a spammer thought he'd have to appear in a public-service television commercial explaining that he'd tried them all and they just didn't work for him.
Convicted hackers like Mr. Jaschan could be sentenced to a lifetime of removing worms and viruses, but the computer experts I consulted said there would be too big a risk that the hackers would enjoy the job. After all, Mr. Jaschan is now doing just that for a software security firm.
The
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The poster needs to have his humour detector adjusted. It should be obvious that Tierney is not quite serious about the death penalty. It's more than a bit tongue-in-cheek. Quote from the article:
Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life.
Just who is this John Tierney anyway? Judging from his whining about 'man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives', he doesn't sound like any computer profesional I know...
1) He's joking.
2) He's a columnist who frequently combines analysis with whimsy.
3) I understand that the submitter and CmdrTaco can't be expected to catch this stuff. But with 67 +1 posts, am I really the only one to get it?
4) How freaking dense are you people? I'm looking forward to "Who is this Dave Barry fellow? He doesn't sound like any computer professional I know...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Not wanting to install a patch to a production server is not necessarily complacency. In point of fact, in some cases, it *is* vigilance, assuming you've ever installed a patch and seen software mysteriously and suddeny cease functioning...it happens on Windows servers from time to time, if you didn't know.
Actually, I do know...as it has happened to me more than once (Windows XP SP2 breaking WinFax and Windows Server 2003 SP1 breaking Windows Update immediately spring to mind). This is where the concept of a QA server comes into play. Any sysadmin worth their salt will have some sort of test server set up where they can test updates, patches, service packs, etc. without endangering their mission-critical systems. It's a simple process, but apparently thre's a lot of sysadmins out there who can't be bothered to exercise due dilligence...hence, my accusation of complacency.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
It's a restating of a very old quotation: From http://www.donewaiting.com/signal/archives/001684. php
"Kill them all, God will know his own." The sole catchphrase of the Cathar conflict to be handed down to posterity is attributed to Arnold Amaury, the monk who led the Albigensian Crusade. A chronicler reported that Arnold voiced this command outside the Mediterranean trading town of Béziers on July 22, 1209, when his crusading warriors, on the verge of storming the city after having breached its defenses, had turned to him for advice on distinguishing Catholic believer from Cathar heretic. The monk's simple instructions were followed and the entire population -- 20,000 or so -- indiscriminately murdered.
Don't know if the parent post is reporting a t-shirt actually seen, or just making a cheap political point. Either seems plausible...
This Tierney guy says that his article is based on an article by Steven Landsburg, an Economics Professor at the University of Rochester.
The original article (by Landsburg himself) is a bit more detailed, and can be found on Slate here:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2101297/
All other costs involved are the ones about investigation and ligitation, not about sentencing.
Normally (if everyone is equal before the law) the cost of ligitation should be the same for lifelong sentences and capital punishement. If the costs of investigation are lower if the prosecutor is not going for the capital punishment, then it looks to me that a prosecutor is more pressing for a thorough investigation if he can score a bull's eye. And if there is so much paper filed for a case then there are more possibilities for the attorneys of the defendant to find contradictions and faults, thus more turns and costs for appeal. And to get someone from the death row surely makes better PR than to get someone out of a lifelong sentence.
Lets put it like this: in theory paying death penalty is cheaper than lifelong sentencing for a society. But because of the prominence for the death penalty all the costs necessary to achieve capital punishment are higher, and surely a huge part of them can be attributed to the vanity of the legal actors.
Damn! I just modded up another comment and sorry for the poster but I can't read THAT and not tell you that you are simply awfully arrogant to think that Gandhi didn't know that!
:). I don't think, of course, you didn't know the Talion law, but still it's a little arrogant to think Gandhi didn't know that, only based on what he said and looking ridiculously to it without seeing that it's just a great piece of rhetoric.
The "an eye for an eye" thing is an old jewish law called the Talion Law, and damn EVERYBODY ON CIVILIZED EARTH knows that! I'm sure Gandhi did, too, you know... It was made even more famous by the very opposite philosophy proposed by someone you may have heard of, who said "If someone hits you on one cheek, present the other" which was a reversal from the then current (violent) doctrine. It's a fundamental difference between old judaism and early christiannism (which has now become quite irrelevent in both religions). Of course it dealt with justice and reparation, but in an excessive way, and it's clear Gandhi was cultivated enough to know all that.
Gandhi's saying was just a well found formula to reject the world's massive use of the violent justice, as seen in death penalty, zero tolerance, fascism, and of course in his case, expressed that Indian should not take on British with violence, looking for vengeance, but pacifically (and it did work). I think it's a great analogy.
Maybe our views differ on the subject, but anyway I just had to tell my point of view, now take it and do whatever you like with it
Just have a look at Gandhi's page at Wikipedia to see that he was well aware of the "civilized world" and its religions, having studied in London.
I agree with you that we're spoiled.
But perspective is a bitch. As a kid, you don't create the conditions, you deal with them. And as a kid, I remember distinctly going hungry.
In regards to crackheads, my best friend's mom was an actual crackhead. Mine was an illegal immigrant, so she couldn't work for much of my childhood... or worked sparingly. We'd both be hungry and we'd steal Utz brand potato chips from the bodega on the corner often on a summer night to get through to the next day. hypoglycemic headaches are a bitch when you're a kid. I remember them clearly.
In Harlem now, I can imagine that there are kids like me and my friend... just dealing with conditions that are placed upon them.
un burrito me trampeó.
There are two types of poverty:
Absolute Poverty: The inability to live off you income, afford food etc.
Relative Poverty: Those earning under 25% of the median income of a country.
The story is "A Perfect Fit", available in the Asimov collection "Winds of Change".
I must say, I don't know if the author of this article has ever tried to write any satire before. If so he needs to work on it. But anyway...
I would suggest that anyone taking his op-ed seriously needs to read Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. It's a fantastic piece about dealing with 18th Century England's population/poverty/crime problems by eating the poor. It also is not The Idiot's Guide to GTK+ or some such book.
I would like sourcing on your claims that prison rape isn't widespread in Western nations other than the U.S. I would also be very interested to see where polling data can be found that proves your second claim that American Citizens feel prison rape is "OK" or "to be expected".
Dr Véronique Vasseur was head physician at the French prison Santé for six years. She wrote a book called Médecin-chef à la Prison de la Santé that put forward claims of: prison rapes, prisoners forcing weaker prisoners to be slaves, beds teeming with lice and other insects, cells teeming with rats and mice, guards beating up prisoners, spoiled food frequently given to prisoners, frequent gastroenteritis epidemics, etc. French commissions were ordered to study the reported problems, but the results seem to have gone down the public's memory hole.
There is probably evidence to suggest all prisons, Western or otherwise, are very unpleasant.
I don't excuse any bad acts by Americans or any person of any nationality. I simply don't agree with your method of posting unsourced and I suspect, biased claims.
So hacker gets death...because he costs companies millions in lost revenue, but CEO of company who commits fraud and loots the pension funds for billions gets nothing or maybe a few years in prison?
Actually, it was kind of tongue-in-cheek, meant to illustrate the seriousness of the effects of some of the worst attacks. And actually, it's more than "millions" that things like the premier worms and viruses cost. It's "billions", real billions of dollars, just like the looting CEOs. And that "lost revenue" that you seem so quick to write off amounts to real impact on our economy. Real lost jobs, real negative impacts, real effects on the mechanics of US business and government.
And a "few years in prison"?
63-year old former Worldcom CEO Bernard Ebbers got 25 years.
80-year old Adelphia founder John Rigas got 15 years.
48-year old former Adelphia CFO Timothy Regas got 20 years.
(The Enron trial is not until January 2006).
Seems like they're getting what they deserve, eh? Doesn't sound like "nothing" to me (funny how the slashdot crowd seemingly expects the wheels of justice to turn instantly there, but would likely be part of the same group of people who would be overly careful to not rush to prejudge others of perhaps lesser means in legal situations).
Malicious computer hackers (née crackers) and malware writers should get due punishment as well. And no, not the "death penalty", but a harsh one. And no, not kids who pass around the admin password for iBooks in junior high, or people who happen to surf via an open, unprotected access point. But the real malicious hackers; the exact type the original article is referring to.