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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
Ahh. That explains the demise of Phrack I guess.
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.
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
Yes, lets kill hackers, but lets let more and more child molesters out of jail
priorites people
...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.
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
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.
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.
"shutdown"? Don't molly-coddle 'em.
# kill -9 1
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?
I see this as yet another fundemental misunderstanding of what security _is_ and how the proposed fix doesn't address the real problem in the least. As you correctly point out, admins and users are at fault here. The internet is a snapshot of society that has no boundaries. Anything that would happen in the real world will happen online. If purposeful defacement and destruction of property cannot be contained in the real world, nor will it online. Does the statement, "We should put to death people who create griffiti." even sound slightly rational?
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.
Someone who can stick a price on human life, or argument for improving the economy by killing people deserves no respect from me.
This "journalist" did just that.
The article is pure flamebait. I don't even start telling about the collective responsibility of software makers and the lazy sysadmins. The sasser worm was like a polite burglar: if it found the front door open, it went in. If it found it closed, it went away. Well, newsflash dear analysts: until you start paying attention to security there always will be a guy who writes a crappy virus (95% of them is _crude_) which wreaks havoc only because users and vendors like Microsoft of ignoring security.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
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
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....
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.
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.
Having a test server is a simple process.
Knowing what all to test... that's the hard part.
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!
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 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.
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?
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").
For more perspective on this, and to see some of the subjects of his past columns, see here.
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