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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?"
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?
Yeah, we're looking at the right places for deterence.
Wowsers. Makes me wonder what the punishment would be for the software vendors whose products are virus friendly?
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Why not give those people a good ol' public whipping?
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Since part of the sentence for people convicted of computer crimes is that they can never use a computer again, they actually do lose their best opportunity to make a decent living.
Personally I think the idea of a death penalty for hacking is rediculous. People have lost their retirement savings because of the actions of a few executives at Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco. I do not hear anyone calling for "The Death Penalty for Intentional Accounting Fraud."
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Further, not only does the blame have to be spread around a little, the concept of a death penalty is abhorrent to most democratic countries outside of the US.
We don't have it here in Australia, doesn't exist in the UK, don't think the Candian's have it. The whole principle of "better to let many guilty men go free than one innocent man be imprisoned" applies further to "better many guilty men are not killed so than one innocent man is not".
The very fact that there is one, let alone many death row inmates who have then been later proven innocent clearly shows that you shouldn't kill people... just in case. I mean in prison in many cases is worse than death, in fact, you get pounded in the ass for a lifetime, THEN you die. I mean if someone killed my family in some mass murder and I was thinking vengfully I'd want him to rot in prison for the term of his natural life and then die. The real problem is these pussy "life" imprisonments which aren't actually for the term of the prisoners life.
And even IF we were to say that the death penatly is ok as a form of retribution and as a form of deterent. This should only apply to the highest of crimes. I think they had the death penalty in south africa for liquor store hold ups for a short time. Soon took it away. Why? Because people were killed the store attendants. I mean, if you are getting the death penalty ANYWAY you may as well remove witnesses too right?
I would end this by saying, there are a number of troll-journalists now who know they can make some outrageous statement about linux or other outrageous claim and get slashdotted. This is not new, there have always been troll-journalists. In fact, I would venture to say that the majority of journalists are trolls (with the exception of the female creatures they put on as news anchors to try and seduce us).
In short, this is an outrageous troll.
No, the external damage is caused solely by the virus/worm writers. Sure the companies could have done more to protect themselves and those who were responsible within the company should be punished by the company, but ultimate responsibility belongs with the ones who write the malicious code. I can think of a couple analogies (even one with a car) involving blaming the victim but I think there are enough of those on slashdot.
Since nearly everything involved computers, this left him very helpless. Restaurants had computers at the tables that you used to order, for example--so he could not get food at a restaurant unless he asked someone to order for him. Same for pretty much any purchase, or use of public transportation, and so on.
The idea behind this punishment (which was for one year) was to make him see how dependent society was on computers, and therefore how serious and bad a crime it was to do anything that threatened the security of or the public's confidence in computers.
The problem is not with the hackers. The problem is with poorly written software that allows this kind of attack/hack happen. If it wasen't for hackers our software would be very insecure and would be leeking holes everywhere. You can't say software companies/hardware companies fix security holes just becuase they might find a security risk. They are all re-active to security issues and NOT pro-active. You ask me, the death sentance should be given to anyone who releases a Operating system that requires 6a service packs just to make the software fuctional. A software company needs to take more responsablity for the software they release. Perhaps they should stop trying to push "new" releases all the time and just focus on one "good" product.
"people who cause massive damage on an any scale - economic, physical, emotional - are sociopaths."
Then killing them is the only solution, since 'curing' them is basically impossible and locking them up only gives them a chance to escape.
Theodore Dalrymple had an interesting article printed a few years ago when he was talking to prisoners about their thoughts on the death penalty: the conclusion was that prisoners were vastly _MORE_ supportive of the death penalty than the law-abiding. After all, they live in a world full of crime, and see the consequences on a regular basis.
No. But I wouldn't mind throwing those that create graffiti in jail for a good 10 years.
Quite frankly, I find it disgusting when people harm others (or their property) for no purpose whatsoever. At least when someone steals 20 bucks from a convenience store, you understand why... they needed money and while it is completely unacceptable, they were doing something to help themselves. With things like graffiti or viruses, you're harming others for the sheer joy of harming others. There's no benefit to the person doing the harm. That's just sick and should be punished as such. Maybe they should be sent to a mental institution.
not so anymore. not in the united states. the very nature of poverty has changed fundamentally.
I grew up in a welfare hotel in Harlem, here in New York. In the 90s, as a teen, I had a computer. So did a good number of my friends. Granted, most of us were in an accelerated academic program, so most of my friends were geeks, but we for the most part had computer systems.
Kids now in my old neighborhood definitely have computers, and penetration is significant as computers are cheap. Local community leaders have impressed on the population the importance of computer literacy and parents have followed suit.
And Harlem is as poor as a lot of places in this country.
More importantly, having a computer and an internet connection is immediate distraction from poverty. When I was a kid, and to this day, cable penetration was very high, especially given that we had the second lowest per capita income in the city. It's the same reason drugs flourish in poor communities. When you're poor, you pay a premium for distraction. Computers these days are a relatively cheap distraction.
and so you understand, I remember times when my computer was new and our refrigerator was empty. I can imagine it not being different now for some kids in Harlem and other poor places in the country.
un burrito me trampeó.
Should the punishment for releasing a virus be tough? I don't think so. I think that it is a pretty benign "crime". It is crucial that we keep a sense of proportion when discussing the sentencing stage of justice.
Considering both the money lost by business and disruptions to things like air travel, I'd say it's far from "benign," and definitely a crime. Death penalty? Hell yeah. But something harsher than a few months' worth of suspended sentence was in order on this one, IMO.
Kids, creating computer viruses has VERY real consequences, and should most assuredly be a crime, and the kind that involves actual prison sentences...the kind where you really go to prison (the length of these sentences should, of course, be determined largely by both the damage caused and possible damage caused, within reason).
But yeah, this guy is an asshat for even bringing up the idea of the death penalty in this case.
I'll begin spelling out the sentencing issue then get onto the humour.
Extrme Punishment
Really, I'm not kidding this is a first-class idea. After all extending sentences to the point of life has worked so well for us in the War on Drugs! Really, you may think I'm being sarcastic but I'm not.
Over the years we have steadily increased the minimum punishments available for certain crimes on the general assumption that more fear for the criminals is better. This has reached an extreme in places like California whose 3-strikes law mandates that all triple felons (tax cheats and teenagers using the wacky weed included) go to jail For Life.
This benevolent program has blessed the state with a large and growing prison population that can make things like license plates, or just sit around and be a drain on the economy when they are no threat to anyone. It has also given California a large commercial prison system which cost the state untold dollars, and employs many fine and underpaid guards as well as passing large amounts of money off to contractors to build ever more large and dangerous prisons.
At present the state has found that by diverting at least drug addicts into treatment rather than the 3-strikes system they save as much as $300,000 per.
Moreover, despite ever-tougher sentencing there is no proof, in California, New York or anywhere else that these sentences have acted to reduce crime in any meaningful sense. One could argue that people should be afraid of the law and I will grant you that people are but there is no evidence that I have seen which proves (in a meaningful sense) that this changes the actions of criminals in any overall sense. Crime existed before, and it still exists.
As to the death penalty, despite normative arguments to the contrary there is no hard evidence that it has deterred even one criminal. States that use it have as much or more crime than those that don't. Similarly, states that have abandonded it (Illinois) have seen no attendent growth in crime. One could argue that this is a fluke I suppose but one cannot argue that it is positive evidence for the penalty.
At best the death penalty gives us a "Cathartic Release" as one author put it. But as Illinois' last governor noted that catharsis is not worth the lives of innocent people who are executed. And make no mistake, innocent people sometimes do get sent to jail.
So yeah, in light of the staggering evidence that meting out unreasonable and excessive punishments does nothing to reduce crime but only costs us unreasonable amounts of money and, probably, gets in the way of real solutions to our problems, I think that we should dive headfirst onto that rock.
Humour
The real purpose of the column, I suspect, was not to advocate the death penalty (but you never know) I suspect that it was really his attempt to make humour out of the situation (smelly socks) and to complain that the Germans aren't punishing their crackers enough. This is, as I see it, basically a joke. The problem is that at the core of the joke is the idea that more extreme sentencing is needed.
While the cathartic joy of knowing that the latest Sasser guy is sent to AOL's Helldesk for life is there that relly won't help anyone but AOL.
Personally I favor the idea of community service (perhaps more than 30 hours perhaps not). I want to see someone who causes such destruction help others in a meaningful way. I want to see them giving free computer classes to children in public schools, or helping libraries to setup their systems (under supervision) or help build something of value.
The bottom line is that there are two ways to think about crime and punishment. The first is to seek catharsis, to salve the basic desires for vengance or some public demonstration of retribution. This view favors things like the death penalty and lends itself to the state of affairs we have now, ever increasing prison terms, ever increasing pri
The contrast between urban poor and rural is also kind of striking; rural poor don't bother with any of the 'distractions' - they are too busy actually out working in a field somewhere to grow food, repair their house, etc. Rural poor actually make it a point to try and not have to depend on the government to get them out of dire straits - a marked difference from urban poor (observe: red counties vs. blue counties). In fact, sometimes it's hard to define what rural poor really is: I've known some people who by most measures were dirt poor, but they: owned a piece of property, had a house, had enough food to eat, and had enough running water and resources to not be stricken by disease, and enough surplus to have free time to go on nice trips around their area (the Appalachians). And these folks were not uneducated either. The big difference is that they didn't worry about gadgets, television, the latest fashions, whatever. They were content with what they had, and they had enough to not live a life of hardship. Yes, they had to work, but were they poor? In some ways I think they are richer than I am.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
The virus situation is much more like if..
every house in the world has a "Microsoft Super security system (tm)" installed so you shouldn't be able to get through the front door without a key.
then a guy discovers he can get into his house without a key so he makes a robot who opens other houses, closes the door then has sex with the TV to make another robot who goes into another house to fuck a TV.
I think this is perfectly acceptable since no one would know you don't need a key to get into Microsoft houses if the robot hadn't started his rampage of hot television on robot sex!
Hitler's in the fridge.
Well, that didn't take long. I think we really need a new analogue to Godwin's Law as follows:
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving child molestors approaches 1 (i.e. certainty)."
Think of the children! Won't somebody *please* think of the children?!
If only I had mod points - the parent post states succinctly something that I was always amazed at. That the "poor" pay a premium for distraction. I never understood why the people with the least disposable income seem to "squander" it on lottery tickets, drugs, flashy jewelry, overprice automobile accessories, etc. But the parent post summed it up well, these things all give you a momentary jolt from your painful circumstances. I can see the same parallels with the "poor" kids of decades ago seeking escape in libraries. Would we begrudge a child ten paperback books or a bargain basement Dell pc?
Well, I was going to post a rant on how these the person writing this, and the academic cited in the headline were calling for the death penalty when far greater crimes against humanity are going unpunished than wasting peoples time and money cleaning virus and deleting spam. But my problem with it goes much deeper. The academic in the article seems to be confused with the terms business and society. He states that hackers do more damage to society, per hacker, than murderers, monetarily. He uses this to say it is more logical to give the death penalty to hackers. In most of the statistics I've seen regarding spam and viruses they usually pertain to businesses, not to society. Since he's using the amount of monetary damage inflicted as a means of determining whether someone should be put to death it would seem quite logical by this reasoning to put several of the board members of Enron to death. They after all stole billions of people's pensions and precipitated a massive drop in the markets and various other large scale effects. The stock market dropped more after Enron than it did after 9/11.
I believe the academic wanted to make a point that perhaps harsher penalties are warranted, but the two crimes he chooses are so different that his argument looses much of it's meaning. He chooses murder, the taking of a life, which capitol punishment has not shown to be a deterrent of, which he compares to an action that is sometimes an immature prank by a teenager or a means criminally disseminating unwanted advertisements or illegally obtaining financial information for the purpose of fraud. I didn't know the two had reached a level where they were comparable in harm to society. If he wanted to bring up another crime to compare it to he should have chosen corporate fraud. It is more similar in it's effect, and it more measurable in it's effect. I seems he just used murder to make it sound more sensational, and to garner more attention.
That's where I have a problem with this academic. He's trying to gain attention for the problem he's studying (and possibly himself), but ends up framing all of society in monetary terms, devaluing life, and everything else society entails in the process. It is not very smart to devalue the thing you are trying to protect in trying to make a point. But this is just more of the monetizing of life which is now so prevalent in this corporate dominated culture.
Murder's price derives from it's effect on the family of the victim, it's effect on the surrounding area, even the effect on the perpetrators family, and I'm not going to try and quantify the cost of a human life here. Areas with high murder rates also can become seriously depressed and impoverished, sometimes extending to effects on entire regions. There are of course monetary costs involving incarceration and court costs, but to bring down human life to level of spam is insulting at best, and shows the weakness of his argument when referring to costs to 'society'.
Here is where I realized I agree somewhat with the author's proposition of what he refers to as 'something worse than death'. While I don't agree with the worse than death portion, I do agree that the punishment should involve undoing or at least repairing some of the damage that was inflicted in the crime. It just doesn't make sense to lock someone up for years on end, encuring yet more financial cost to the government and taxpayers, when a more appropriate form of punishment would be a long term of some sort of community service. It would benefit both society and the individual much more than simple encarceration. As for deterrents, that's anyone's guess.
It also occurred to me in writing this that perhaps the academic's true intent was to make point that would shock people and hence stimulate debate, sort of like Ward Churchil. If that is the case then I might not have a problem with this, but I doubt many people will think that far into this.
I apologize for any bad editing, I've been writing this in between labeling, folding, stuffing and posting 200+ envelopes. Now that is a punishment worse than death...
Unless the parent(s)are total crack-heads, do any kids in the US REALLY go hungry?
Yes, yes they do. Not many do, but some extreme cases do. There are a lot parents who you might call "total crack-heads." My sister works as a teacher at an inner city school, and she sees a lot of this sort of thing. Some kids only get a school lunch as a reasonable meal.
In the projects, there are two essentials -- a car and cable. Properly feeding and clothing your kids is secondary. It's not surprising given that most "parents" in the projects are stupid kids who got pregnant at an early age and never really learned how to fend for themselves. These are people who have no job skills and no initiative to improve themselves since they see every other pathetic loser around them as the status quo. They have no role models other than the flashy celebrities on the TV living hedonistically for little hard work (making music or playing games). As long as they're having fun and looking cool to their peers, everything's good.
The kids (most of whom weren't wanted when the mother got pregnant) are treated as an burdensome obligation in many cases. They're taken care of just as well as any other unwanted chore is -- that is, shoved off on a grandparent or even another child. My sister has seen a six year old left at home alone to take care of a two year old. (Poor girl got put in a foster home where the foster parents didn't care about her either and just wanted to spend the welfare check for taking her in. I digress.)
We are SO spoiled.
Exactly. This is why this sort of thing happens. If the parents honestly had to work to survive and didn't have their own parents to fall back on, I think these kids would be a little better cared for. For the most part, parents in the poor neighborhoods DO feed their kids, but the cheap crap they feed them isn't healthy for them. This is why obesity is on the rise fastest in the poorest areas of the nation. How much does a good healthy meal with vegetables cost vs. McDonald's. You do the math.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This "journalist" did just that.
The article is pure flamebait.
Someone who can make an outraged (outraged!) post about an article based on a Slashdot writeup might not deserve so much respect either....
The journalist you're scorning (John Tierney) was very clearly NOT advocating the death penalty. He discussed an interesting report made by an analyst putting things in perspective -- i.e., that if you look at the penalties purely from the standpoint of saving society money, a death penalty for serious "hacker" crimes is much more logical than the death penalty for murder. Then he dismissed this as (rather obviously) impractical:
agreed completely. its why i made a point of noting that we'd steal chips from the store. that qualified as food for us.
i can give you an example of a meal. we might split a big bag of potato chips and get these things that we called "quarter waters" - these little plastic jugs of flavored sugar water with artificial flavor. Two kids could eat for $1.50-$2.00.
another poster made a point of discussing the rise of obesity in poor neighborhoods.
An interesting study has been done on obesity in New York City. The upper east side is the leanest place in the city (also the richest, per capita). Harlem is the fattest. The border is east 96th street. The rates of obesity and associated degenerative disease quadruple when you CROSS THE STREET. Much of it is due to availability of foods or lack thereof.
un burrito me trampeó.
For more perspective on this, and to see some of the subjects of his past columns, see here.
Over time, prisons became run-down and overcrowded. Conditions worsened. The situation boiled over, several times - perhaps the most dramatic was the Strangeways rooftop protest. At about this time, you again see an increase in crime and violence that matches the deterioration of the penal system.
The only obvious conclusion is that deterrence and punishment, per se, have no value in themselves. The idea, then, that by making these worse for hackers we can eliminate "cybercrime" is absurd. We have absolutely no evidence to back such a claim, and quite a lot of evidence that it is very unlikely to work.
So, what would I propose? I would suggest giving those who carry out such crime some therapy on the off-chance that the talent is being misused because of emotional dysfunction. I would also suggest education, to convert the talent into a marketable skill. Combined, these would still be cheaper than a US-style execution and even if only that 0.02% he talked of could be turned into high-grade talent, the country would actually turn a profit on the whole deal.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In 2000 Micro$oft paid ZERO Federal taxes.
For the last FIVE years before Enron becoame defunct it also paid ZERO Federal taxes.
Boeing corporation, in 2003 paid ZERO federal taxes as well.
That's right - YOU paid more federal tax a few years ago then fricking M$, Boeing or Enron.
You want to save society some cash?
How about we start knocking off a few corporate monopolists before we start on the script kiddies?
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Jeebus, where did you come up with that number? More than one in ten Americans are homeless?
A quick Google gave me a total of about 600,000.
the man-years I've
This is the stupidest snippet ever. 1 man-year == an amount of men, x, working on a problem for y days each, such that x*y = 364 days.
You, as an individual, cannot work more then 1 man-year in a year. In fact, I highly doubt anyone has ever worked 1 man-year in a year - you have to sleep sometime. This guy is claiming to have spend 365 may-days (8760 man-hours) running virus scans and reformatting hard drives. Working 40 hour weeks, that's 219 weeks. That's more then four years. And that's assuming that he never does any other sort of work.
Looks like someone needs to brush up on their journalism skills.