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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
Somone call John Dvorak...his title as reigning champion of the blithering idiots is being seriously contested.
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...perhaps if he was a bit more in the know, he'd know that although Microsoft had released a patch for this loophole on 13 and 28 April 2004, many companies had not applied this protection before Sasser struck. Perhaps some of Mr. Tierney's considerable ire should be redirected towards the hordes of lazy sysadmins who had a solution for the Sasser worm, but chose complacency over vigilance.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
...public floggings of idiots that don't sufficiently protect/firewall their computers!
Ahh. That explains the demise of Phrack I guess.
No amount of money loss is worth a loss of someones life.
Indeed, there can be no crime for which the death of an individual can be justified.
Otherwise pure hypocrisy rules.
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?
Companies are always quick to blame the 'hackers' when something bad happens. What they need to do is look inside first at themselves. Besides the fact that the vast majority of damage done to company computers is an inside job, most of the external damage (caused by worms and viruses, etc) is caused by people not patching vulnerable systems or having a poor network setup. The virus/worm writers certainly aren't innocent, but a lot of the companies are as guilty for not doing what they need to to defend against such attacks.
- AMW
We must stand firm with our allies, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria, in sending sinners to god for their eternal punishment. If they're not guilty, they're martyrs, and we've hastened their journey to their eternal reward, to the root account in the sky.
"Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" - T-Shirt at the Republican National Convention
--
make install -not war
Yes, lets kill hackers, but lets let more and more child molesters out of jail
priorites people
I hope that we reach that point far in advance of advocating the death penalty for electronic trespassers. Even a fan of stiff penalties should pause and reflect before going there based upon a dispassionate cost/benefit analysis.
The worse-than-death ideas in the article are amusing, though.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...is to make them work the Help Desk of any random ISP.
Except for the fact that the idea is horribly wrong from an ethical viewpoint, it also simply won't work. The efficacy of a punishment is more related to the chance of being caught than to the severity of the punishment.
Despite the risk of huge fines, almost everyone downloads movies at a regular basis, because the chances of being caught are near zero.
get the "death" penalty. I think the guys from Enron and MCI, etc, who cost 10's of millions of damage in the form of lost pensions and 401K's for their employees should recieve an equivalent "death" penalty.
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
Yes, but some really rich guys had to fire half their master bathroom attendant staff for a week because they lost a few million as a result. Those former attendants were then deported because they were not legal citizens. In their home country they were seen as failures for not saving their family and stoned to death in a public square.
See...hacking causes death! Death to hackers!
That punishment doesn't fit the crime. In many ways our justice system makes victims out of the perpetrators of crimes when the punishment is way out of proportion to the actual crime committed. When that happens, the justice system is perpetrating an injustice on the person found guilty in court.
I don't like how some people think that just because someone is obnoxious or causes minor damage (and let's face it, virus infestations are fairly minor compared to the gamut of actual crimes that people are let off the hook with much less punishment) that they should be put away for ever or even put to death. I think it reeks of a completely blown sense of proportion. Unfortunately, the voters who think this way are more prone to vote than people who are more sanely-minded.
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.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
The general public get criminalized, and people who (while complete pricks) aren't physically harming anyone get sentenced to death.
At the same time, the **AA is running protection rackets and giving MS a reason to control the hardware you paid for. Not just in the US, but the rest of the world too. Both companies supported by a warmongering government that never should've been reelected.
Call me crazy, but I think a public rebellion is in order here.
I'd appreciate it if any death penalty advocates could please cite a published work (in a reputable journal) which clearly shows statistical evidence that the death penalty actually acts as a deterrant in the mind of would-be criminals.
As far as I can tell, it's just something that sounds really good. You know, "Criminals will be very scared of being killed for their actions, because normal people are very scared of being killed." From the little I know about the workings of the human mind, most sociopaths don't react to things the same way the rest of us do, and people who cause massive damage on an any scale - economic, physical, emotional - are sociopaths.
Anyway, I'd just appreciate some good evidence for the "deterrant" hypothesis. Then I'll start to believe it might be a good idea.
As a kid, I used to think the death penalty was a great idea.
At about age 16, we had a school debate on the subject. I was on the 'pro' death penalty side, but that debate sowed the inital small niggles of doubt.
By the time I was 18, I realised the death penalty was completely barbaric. If just one innocent person is executed, that's tantamount to state sponsored murder. That's not to mention that capital punishment doesn't seem to deter crime anyway - Texas is executing more people than ever.
One of the interesting things - if you have a debate with most pro-capital punishment people, they go awfully quiet when you ask them what would they do if they were falsely convicted of a capital crime. How would they feel as they were about to be gassed for a crime they didn't commit?
I'm glad the EU outlaws capital punishment - it's a concept that should have disappeared in the 19th century. As Ghandi said - an eye for an eye and soon the whole world would be blind.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
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.
Instead of "hacking" as a crime, perhaps the "hacker" should be charged with any crime that happens as a result. Break into a banking system, and it's fraud and possibly theft. Break into the 911 system and cause several people to die because they couldn't get help, and it's murder. Then, you don't have to make up new punishments and new laws and the punishment will be appropriate to the damage done.
It just seems obvious to me. Am I missing something here?
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:
Of course this is too harsh.
Do rapists, killers, pedophiles and other kinds of criminals get death penalties or lifetime jail ? Not in my country. Not in any country of the EU. Even in the USA, only killers get death sentences, and other kinds of crimes don't get you such harsh sentences (but correct me if I'm wrong here).
Immaterial "crimes" like cracking into a computer system are only crimes because we decide so. We decide so because it is a way of ensuring the stability of our economic system. That's fine, but if we begin to compare that in severity to physical crimes, where people get injured, where violence happens, that means that we have forgotten everything. If we jail more severely (lifetime) a computer cracker than a rapist (usually 2 years jail), then we are totally decadent.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
I like it! You sit the guy down at a special computer:
Punch the monkey to win a prize!
[click]
WHOMP!
Splat.
***
It's got kind of a poetic justice.
So this whole "an execution saves us $100M" concept is kind of troubling -- it's based on estimates that an execution deters a certain number of murders. Say, 10, at $10M per murdered person.
Some people also estimate that an execution deters zero murders -- after all, the vast majority are committed in the heat of the moment.
If zero murders are prevented by execution, then each execution really costs us millions of dollars in fees for a constitutionally-entitled defense and appeal.
So the comparison at the heart of this blather is potentially bogus, as are many monetary estimates of impact of things like piracy (and to a lesser degree, malicious hackers).
circa75.com
You are under arrest for crimes against profit. You have the right to ... well, nothing. A summary hearing by the corporate tribunal followed by execution shall follow shortly.
I recall reading somewhere that lawyers originated in ancient Rome because plebians were not entitled to any form of justice, so they had to hire a member of the nobility (ie someone with money) if they were so ungrateful as to demand redress against some other noblemann that raped and pillaged everything they held dear.
Fortunately though this guy is a nutjob with no influence of policy, of which there is no short supply either in the modern or ancient world. Too many people seem to get a stainless steel boner thinking of a world like this for it to bode well for any of us though.
Vengence shouldn't be a part of a court system. Your personal feelings (and mine if it happened to my child) shouldn't really be taken into account. That personal rage is not a solid foundation for justice.
If there is a manditory death sentence for these crimes, and the members of the jury do not agree with the manditory sentence, they probably won't convict. There are people who are wholly against the death penalty for any crime and they will be on the jury. If the sentence is a long prison term, these same people will more likely convict.
What if someone raped your child or SO?
Perhaps "how you feel" should not be a factor in the severity of the sentencing.
Justice should be served cold, not hot. Too often logic and reason gives way to emotions and the public's desire for a lynching. That is a travesty.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
You know, when a girl is wearing a short skirt, and she's walking at night alone? She's just as guilty of rape as the guy who rapes her, for not defending herself adequately.
</SARCASM>
That sort of thinking is nonsense.
Not that I agree with this article either. I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who uses a "cost-benefit analysis" to determine who should live and who should die. (Why not just kill all the old people?)
I always find this kind of thing amusing. This is really a manifestation of the fact that normal people are just basically fed up with computers. Worm writers are an outlet for this frustration, which gets us here, repsonding to an op-ed recommending the death penalty for a 17 year old who wrote a program.
Why amusing? Because "normal" people don't seem to turn their anger on some of the root causes. I mean, admit it, the prevalence of worms is really a symptom, not a cause. Anyone who isn't "new here" knows where I'm going with this, but I'll say it anyway: turn an eye towards Redmond for the real culprit.
For folks that a tire of having to run anti-virus, anti-spyware and constantly download and install "service packs" that break programs that they've already paid for, this one is for you. May we all learn to take security seriously in the *design* of the software, rather than tacking it on as an afterthought. Treating security like it is a trivial toy just so you can tack another bullet on the box is the real crime.
I'm serious when I say that I look forward to the "next generation" of operating systems that will hopefully take security FAR more seriously than this generation did. I'm not talking about Longhorn, I'm talking about the operating systems my children will be using (children I don't have yet). Will worms and viruses still exist? Sure. They always will. But at least we'll have some doors with locks, and perhaps a security system by then; right now, most of us live in a tent that we bought that advertised "Sturdy, intruder repellent vinyl!".
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.
I wouldn't go so far as to say the US is evil. It's just the greedy bastards that run the US that are evil. The American citizens are (mostly) not.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
If we punish with the death penalty those whose actions upset the lives of many many other people, and also cost lots and lots, then there is a long list of people who qualify. CEOs who rob pension funds, for example. Various politicians....
Punishments should be harsher than they are currently, but death or a life sentence is way out of line for the crime. Once they start putting child molesters to death then maybe someone can start to think about it for computer crimes.
What I dislike here is the double standard. Basically we have corporations _whining_ because they can't figure out how to hire the right folks to protect their networkers(or are too cheap to do so). On the other hand, we have CEO's of major corporations running places like Enron and Anderson that are essentially criminal organizations--and getting a complete slap on the wrist. Look at Ken Lay, the worldcom CEO, Milken. These folks all get the best justice money can buy-the type of service the average hacker just can't afford. The damage a crooked CEO can do at the helm of a major corporation makes what hackers do _pale_ by comparison. I don't see hackers leading the US into a pointless war in which thousands of young americans die or are permanently disabled to protect oil interests. I don't see hackers promoting products like thimerosal that may be causing permanent disability in children(or buying crooked politicians to get preferential legislation). I don't see hackers getting a corrupt president elected by vote fraud to refuse to enforce immigration law so corporations can make more money.
If the corporate and governmental leaders want rule of law-they had better start by holding themselves accountable. Is is the corporate and governmental leaders that have created this state where the law is not taken seriously because they have exempted themselves from it.
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.
On the other hand, it is conceivable that people may die as a result of a virus in hospitals, for example.
To me, a virus release could range from a misdemeanor vandalism charge to possibly as high as manslaughter in the extreme case. The crime is serious, but you are right, some people do tend ot lose perspective. Perhaps a turn in the total perspective vortex would do some good.
The problem isn't with the virus-jerks, although I'm not excusing their actions. The problem is software companies aren't held accountable like in other industries.
If Ford, for example, made a car that due to a glitch caused it to run poorly and eat gas, there would be a lawsuit against them in no time flat. If they did it consistently, people would stop buying from them.
That doesn't happen in the software industry. People write crap software that costs "profitability" when it goes haywire ( which happens often ), and the decision makers just shake their heads and mutter something about being the nature of the game.
Virus-jerks aren't the problem, they are a symptom.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
But, since it's here, like everthing else related to property, hysteria rules. I mean, if they can take your house to build a strip mall, let's take it that last step and start killing people for lost profits. We all know that money is more important than the lives of mere humans, whose only purpose is to serve those profits.
What?
Where is Microsoft's responsibility in this punishment scheme?
Really? Why not the same as a auto manufacturer who's defect in a car contributed to an accident? Perhaps car makers should include a EULA that absolves them of all liability too.
Finkployd
I am totally for the death penalty, not even just for murder.
Rape, child abuse, drunk driving, kill them all, we don't need those vermin around.
I like the idea of solving a problem for all time, you kill the offender and your risk of reoffending becomes zero.
However I can't support the death penalty today because it is impractical. We can't guarantee we caught and convict the right person, and it's too expensive. In our quest to limit executing the innocent we spend more than simply jailing them forever.
For those two reasons I am against implementing it, although in theory it's a good idea.
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/
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.
But one of the best arguments I have against all death penalty (including murder) would be in the case of the conviction of an innoncent person. This speaks for itself. To avoid killing one innoncent person is worth not having the death penaltly at all.
And we don't have to stop there. Let's do the spammers too. They are the ones who profit. And the DDOS cartels; death to them too.
Lazy sysadmins who fail to patch their servers promptly: they're costing industry millions. They gotta die.
Who else? Howabout billionaires who aggressivley market insecure operating systems? It's all their fault, after all. Sayonara, Billy-Boy,
And as long as we're motivated by financial loss, let's have people who download illegal MP3 files. Get 'em up against the wall! Offering movies over BitTorrent? Off with yer head! Run Warez? Bye-bye! Say "Hi" to Bill for me...
What else can we do? Employee sickness costs billions to industry. Let's have the death penalty for catching a cold! It doesn't just serve as an incentive - it improves the gene pool as well!
How about criticsing the government? I'll bet millions are spent on spinning the facts every time some ungrateful fool goes and blows the whistle. Let's string 'em up today!
Think you're clever writing open source software do you? you're costing illegal software monopolies money with every line code. Don't think you've escaped our notice.
Oh, and let's include mindless trolls who write idiot stories for major newspapers, and the brain damaged editors who dignify such claptrap by printing it. Let's off them as well. I can't think of a good reason why, but in amidst all this bloodshed, who the hell's going to notice?
+++ SARCASM OFF
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
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.
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.
You know, on a global scale, how we define "poor" and "poverty" is kind of silly.
I have read that ~90% (seems high to me) of the world's population has never made a phone call. Probably a majority of people in the world have substandard food, water and shelter.
Yet in the western world, we define "poverty" as not being able to afford broad-band, or only having one game console, or only having basic cable.
Unless the parent(s)are total crack-heads, do any kids in the US REALLY go hungry? Call me a right wing fascist, but I find that hard to beleive. Food is cheap and plentiful here. You may not be able to afford steak, but most of the world lives on rice and beans, if they can get them.
We are SO spoiled.
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
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.
Here's the problem. Design a system that is completely succeptable to malicious people, and be shocked when somewhere, among the 6 billion people out there, one is malicious. Here are your two solutions....
1) Make the system less succeptable to the darker aspects of human nature.
2) Just take out your fury on the guy who installed seti at home on a work computer.
In the physical world, this argument doesn't even pass the laugh test. Lets say there's a military base, but it has no fence around it. When children wander in and screw with things (perhaps causing serious damage), they are shot. That's hardly a solution. Put up a fence so some five year old doesn't wander in and drive a tank on the freeway, then maybe talk about giving more severe punishments to organized and competent attackers.
Here's another example. At Columbia a few years ago, an elevator in one of the dorms plunged several floors, though fortunately nobody was hurt. They had to repair the elevator. Let's assume that the cost of this came out to $100,000. Columbia blamed the students for jumping up and down in the elevator, nobody knows if those claims are true. In the end, it doesn't matter. An elevator is a moving piece of floor, if jumping on a piece of floor endangers you and causes damage to the building, it's the designer's fault, not yours. If you try to steal $100,000 from a liquor store you'd be shot, should you be shot for jumping in an elevator? No, because reasonable precautions would have prevented that. Save severe punishments for serious malicious attacks that threaten human life and for which there is very little that can be done. If you can build a fence, or a decent elevator, then just start with that, and worry about your bloodthirst later.
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)
a) give the person back his/her freedom back and
b) compensate this time-loss by other means, e.g. money.
In case of the death-penalty there... welll, there is just no way to undo that, now is there? One could think of compensating the relatives, but that won't do any good for the poor sucker who's just been fried/injected/shot/hanged/eaten by ants.
So what should hacking amount to? 7 years ago I was accused of hacking by a police officer because I told him I was programming on a Mud that was based in another state.
Hacking could easily be described as anyone who logged into another server with someone else's login/password. (Logging into NYT's web page with bugmenot) Deserves the Death Penalty? I think not.
So what DOES constitute a death-penalty hacking event? Something that causes a company 1 million dollars worth of lost profit? A life is worth that? Ok, how about 1 billion dollars, or a kazillion? Problem is, ****ALL**** companies, the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA have lied and and inflated their so-called losses by a gross amount. How can you put a life of a person in the hands of corporate greed?
There are OTHER things that need to be fixed first. I don't see how a multi-criminal rapist would get an easier sentence than a kid who altered a VB script that was already out there. I don't see how this whole article could even be considered when the crooks at Enron get off without the death penalty first. Truth is, the author is just pissed off his computer crashed one day I'm sure.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
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...
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 authoritarian view is that the law is absolute. No infraction is acceptable and the importance of the law always trumps the importance of the individual.
In this case, the concept of an "unjust law" is meaningless. If the law says I can cause you harm, then I can do it. If the law requires you do something that is harmful or evil to you, then you must do it. If you disobey or complain, it's you, not the law who are wrong. The law is never wrong.
In the context of this particular discussion, collective punishment becomes significant. The idea is that some particular group of people, as a whole, is perceived to be bad for society. (again, avoiding the oh so tempting inflammatory examples!). When an individual member of that class is caught breaking the law, they are held accountable for the perceived harm caused by the entire class.
The absolutist view appeals to our sense of righteousness. Holding one idea and never under any circumstances questioning that idea gives us a sense of surety. (there's a word for that; can you name it?).The promise is that with perfect compliance we will have peace and safety. Give us, your leaders absoulte powers and provide those who we will point out for you these extreme penalties and we promise you safety, security, peace, and quiet.
What is delivered, however, is never perfect compliance. So we feel moral outrage. We were lied to! We know what's right, and it's the law. So, it must be the violator who is wrong. Obedience is an absolute.
The penalty for disobedience becomes retribution, not justice. The motive for this penalty is moral outrage, not concern for society. In this context, the harshest possible penalty is perfectly reasonable. And, as morally outraged people, we dissociate ourselves from the person we penalize. They are not like us. We can do anything we like to them. Our judgement will never be applied similarly to us because they are wrong and we are right.
The pragmatic view is that society can tolerate a certain amount of non-compliance from its individuals.
This non-compliance, beyond being simply tolerated, is valued and honored with terms like "civil disobedience" and "conscientious objection". When the law is no longer absolute, the term "unjust law" has meaning.
The idea here is that a violation of the law is a discrepancy between the perpetrator and the law. Maybe the perpetrator is wrong. Maybe the law is wrong.
Here, the justification for any penalty is the good of society. Do we punish this person for what he did? For what he might have done? For what he might do in the future? These are decisions that we have to make now--judgements, not application of an absolute forumla.
When we make these judgements, we must also realize that the person we are judging could be one of us. That person is, actually, one of us. The disobedient member of society is no longer a moral outcast, and that means that whatever penalty we pass on him could be applied to us. Maybe we do choose to penalize the individual. Maybe he has harmed us. But it's not quite so easy to dismiss our frustration by beating up on a guilty person.
This mindset considerably devalues obedience for the sake of obedience. In this view, law provides that if a violator causes harm he is punished. But, typically, if the harm is less significant, even if the law has been broken, the penalty is similarly light.
The cost to individual freedom is taken into account when laws are written. It is possible for the lawmaker to say "it costs more of our individual freedom than the value we get by controlling this behaviour." The law then provides some incentive for obedience, but disobedience is expected and largely tolerated.
The cost of this view is that the individuals, being placed
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
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").
If you don't believe me just take a look at your local Whole Foods Market, or as I call it Whole Paycheck Market, and compare it with the stuff that you could get in a foodbank.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
There is also the argument of the scientist where if he had the choice to kill one innoncent person to find a cure for cancer, would he do it? The answer is most likely no. And personally no I do not agree in killing an innoncent life to save others, because if we do take it case by case, it is obvious that if you killed the innoncent guy, than the real guy is out there and your death count is at 11 (innoncent dead convicted guy + your 10 victims that have been killed by the original killer.) And besides that, if the guy is locked away for life, there isn't a chance that he goes out and kills again.
I do agree though, with a punishment that fits the crime but you have to be careful. We have to take into account alot of different factor, for one, the age of the criminal, in the sasser case, 17. Now do you really think that it's fair for him to serve a lifetime sentence? And here is where the kicker is, who gets to decide what is fair? Well for that you've got the jury to thank. But like everyone else, juries are made of people, people aren't perfect, they make mistakes. But I would rather see a mistake that doesn't involve the fate of someone's life.
Over harsh punishment for computer crimes is a bad idea.
1) It's too easy to make someone else look guilty. If you like the girlfriend of the guy in the next cubicle, buy a virus from your local friendly illegal substances dealer and make it appear that it was originated by the guy in the next cubicle. Then offer your most 'deepest' condolences to his newly-available girlfriend.
2) The hackers/virus specialists aren't the cause of the problem. The problem is poorly designed and written operating systems. Killing people who develop applications for the OS isn't going to help fix the OS.
3) The courts can't differenciate those who develop rogue code for 'national security' regardless of the nation from those who write it for amusement or corporate interests.
The best way to deal with virus writers is to make them liable to civil lawsuits for the damage that they cause. Straightforward tort law. Any 17-year-old hacker who realizes that he is going to have to write database front-ends in Visual Basic for the next thirty years to pay off the damage his cool virus has done will reconsider releasing it.
Also remind business leaders that using proprietary operating systems exposes them to underground attack because there isn't an open feedback loop where thousands of qualified people are constantly examining the OS source for flaws.
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:
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)
the writer generalizes "hackers" to be basement dwelling teens whose lives revolve around video games. He says that death row will scare the a good many into submission. How exactly will imposing a lasting example of oppression reduce feelings of teen angst against "the man"?
And you hit the nail on the head. Your typical teenager who is dissatisfied with society will rebel in a destructive way. Computers allow them to easily do that. Telling them "if you write this piece of code, we're going to put you on death row where you'll become a minor celebrity" would probably do little more then make the handful of teens on the borderline of total anti-social behavior go full throttle in seeing who can be the first to produce the first death sentence virus.
What makes matters worse is the law has zero punishment for "the man" doing the exact same thing. Whereas a teenager who writes malicious code which by design finds its way into an unsuspecting remote machine without explicit permission, jeopardizes security and degrades efficiency is a "criminal", a company which does likewise under the guise of "marketing" and produces spyware which secretly finds its way onto millions of remote machines is blameless under the law. The unintentional, but very loud message becomes "If you're doing it for fun, you die. If you're doing it to make money, you're fine".
I'm not a disenfranchised teenager, but I can't see how those who are would find this kind of message a deterrent.
The Internet is generally stupid
C) A five-year ban on using computers.
...
E) Something worse [than death]
Seems like E is redundant for the population in question. And, by the way, I buy this assertion completely:
Hackers are the Internet equivalent of Richard Reid,
This is indisputably true. And having your network DOS'd is also the Internet equivalent of having your body blown to bits over the Atlantic. For that matter being forced to concede in chess is the gaming equivalent of having your country forced into unconditional surrender.
Where we get into trouble is figuring because situations are analagous they must then be equally serious.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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...
I remember reading Moore's Utopia a while ago, and one of the more interesting ideas in it went something like this:
If all crimes, regardless of severity, were punished equally, there would be no incentive not to commit more serious crimes.
In other words, if a "hacker" knows the death penalty is the consequence, what's to stop them from using deadly force in their defense? Murder usually equals the death sentence, and since death is already a given for being a hacker, there is no loss for choosing to kill.
For getting a reaction, I commend the author. I commend them in the same way I'd commend John C. Dvorak. Well done, good troll, but your opinion is ultimately moronic.
You have reached an illogical conclusion.
I probably approached this the wrong way. What if it was someone you knew that you had to sacrifice? Could you tell them? Could you kill them? Though on an impersonnal level, I would agree as well, but I would have much more trouble making it someone I know. I guess that's in a human's nature to be greedy.
"In many ways our justice system makes victims out of the perpetrators of crimes when the punishment is way out of proportion to the actual crime committed. When that happens, the justice system is perpetrating an injustice on the person found guilty in court."
When that happens the justice system is no longer a justice system at all but merely a means of oppression. But worse, it exercises oppression not only over those "convicted of crime" (which itself would have little meaning in an unjust system), but also all people who must live under the yoke of oppression and the threat of being unjustly victimized.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
I have to somewhat agree with the ancestor posts in that when you commit crimes you are effectively saying that you don't want to adhere to the social contract established, so I don't believe a criminal is entitled to all the rights afforded to non-criminals.
It's a social contract that has to be accepted by the majority to work. Think about it.
You impose the death penalty for murderers. 0.01% of the population is now anti-social and has a vested interest in laying society low.
You impose the death penalty for theft. 10% of the population is now anti-social and has a vested interest in laying society low.
You impose the death penalty for copyright infringement. 90% of the population is now under threat of death for their normal living behavior and has a vested interest in laying society low.
At this point, the majority of the people are now anti-social. Sometimes this means rebellion, sometimes it means subversion, but it eventually means the end of the society unless things change.
The social contract is where we all agree that this is the way we want to behave and the way we want to live. If it ceases to be about wanting to comply and becomes something handed down from on high (like the current trend of corporate-bought laws) then it's time to burn the rulebooks and start fresh. Personally, I think we're going to see that time arrive before we die. You can see signs of it all over the place. People don't respect the system. Instead of being precious and treasured to them as it should be, it is generally resented, subverted and ignored. This is all in addition to an ever rising level of violence by the general populace, both against each other and against representatives of the system (terrorism anyone?).
Figuring out the precise way to live and act that produces maximum economic productivity for the benefit of those who control the means of production and using the threat of law (which amounts to the threat of violence) to force everyone to comply is not the way to run a society, at least not in the long term. If it's harming the many for the benefit of a few, that is by its very nature anti-social. The way to run a society is to strip it down so that the laws reflect the way most people wish to live.
Killing people who refuse to behave in a fashion that increases profits for businesses does not seem very social to me. As a matter of fact, it sounds a lot like the kind of slavery that lends moral justification to "Killing the Masters so we can be Free".
Think about that the next time you lend your support to these fear-of-death type laws. Could be a day when you're the one in fear of your life because your lifestyle is no longer approved, or could even be a day when you're the one being slaughtered by those former-slaves-to-the-system you placed in that position with your support.
Intolerance kills.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Sounds to me like this asshole properly failed to secure his computer, got hit with a virus, and now wants to go on a government-sanctioned killing rampage against everyone he believes is the source of his irritation.
Hey, if we aren't going to dick around why not just make ALL 'serious' crimes punishable by death? And while we're at it, let's harvest the organs of these evil lawbreakers and use them to save the lives of countless upright citizens! I think Niven had something to say about that....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
You know, on a global scale, how we define "poor" and "poverty" is kind of silly. ...
Yet in the western world, we define "poverty" as not being able to afford broad-band, or only having one game console, or only having basic cable.
Waaay offtopic, but lets play.
Poor, rich, poverty, money, and all of that are manmade objects. They are not real in "the real world". I would bet that a motivated homeless person eating out of trashcans here in the US can probably eat better than a majority of the people in the "3rd" or "4th" world countries.
Poor, rich, and all that is relative. Being at the bottom of any list is not desirable. I used to think the same thing, that the US people don't know poverty, but if you've ever had the pleasure of really knowing a poor person, wow. They are different, and at the bottom for a reason.
If you can't afford broadband and other junk, you are not as skilled and successful as other people comparatively, so your respect and dignity goes down in comparison of those people. Its that simple.
Also, a trick to remember is that poor is a state of mind, its not a level of the amount of money you have. If I were to rob Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, and leave him pennyless, I doubt he would instantly become "poor". On the inverse, I don't consider people with no money by choice poor. Take Jesus or Mother Theresa as examples. To my knowledge neither of these people had cash, but they are not poor icons, nor are they ever considered poor.
Remember, poor people suck, just ask Kenny.
How much does a good healthy meal with vegetables cost vs. McDonald's. You do the math. In the UK, a McDonalds meal is £2-3 IIRC (I never eat there). I can easily cook a healthy nutritious meal with high-quality ingredients for £1.50 a head - and the more people to feed, the cheaper it gets. So for a large poor family (like mine used to be) McDonalds is (relatively) expensive.
Pirate Party UK
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.