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Building a Global Cyber Police Force
dasButcher writes "One of the biggest obstacles to fighting hackers and cyber-criminals is that many operate in the safe harbors of their home countries, insulated from prosecution by authorities in foreign countries where their targets reside. As Larry Walsh writes in his blog, several security vendors and a growing number of countries are now beginning to consider the creation of a global police force that would have trans-border jurisdiction to investigate and arrest suspected hackers."
I foresee this running into a lot of problems. I mean, we can't even get a lot of countries to agree to ICJ (International Court of Justice) jurisdiction. How are we going to get them to agree to let people physically into their countries to investigate crimes and make arrests? Ain't gonna happen ... and this kind of thing is only effective if everyone signs up without reservations.
The trouble with this, of course, is that one man's "hacker" is another man's journalist, or whistle-blower, or what have you.
Proverbs 21:19
Personally I think anything with "trans-border jurisdiction" is just asking to be taken advantage of. I like the seperation of government and jurisdiction, although I definately think that something like th UN should reform some of their policies on extradition. In any case, trans-border jurisdiction means jack squat if you cant get the local government to cooperate.
The real problem is the lack of international cooperation and extradition treaties that would cover not only cyber crime, but crimes of all sorts. Creating a hyper-focused solution for a narrow aspect of a broader problem is only going to create more problems, and ultimately erode more freedoms than the number of crimes it may solve.
Wouldn't that be Interpol? Sounds too much like big brother when someone asks for a police force that already exists. The bigger problem with hackers is they are hard to find regardless of which country they are in. Sure Iranian Hackers are harder to catch but with their bandwidth are they really a threat? Do we need yet another redundant police force?
the MPAA, RIAA and other such scumbags getting in on this. Instead of catching real hackers, they go for the easy fish and arrest students and casual pirates.
Nowadays I don't have trust in any authoritative figure like this. They are usually backed by big corporations, that serve only corporate interests.
The problem here is not a lack of police with the jurisdiction to investigate and arrest suspected hackers. The subject countries have lots of those.
What's missing is a state willingness to prosecute, a willingness that won't change just because the cops are enforcers from Superpol. There is no reason to believe that the US, for example, would let a bunch of policemen from Europe and the Middle East come in and arrest US citizens on the basis of allegations that they broke some Saudi law. They barely tolerate Interpol, and those guys are just librarians.
When you balance the probable damage a "global police force" would do (is anyone naive enough to think that their mandate wouldn't be expanded?) against the damage that expatriate hackers do, the wise thing is to go with the hackers. The proper solution is the one already in place, and that's to have bilateral and multi-lateral extradition agreements.
Sending contract cops into a country that doesn't have laws against hacking may make good TV but the real-life consequences are much more complicated.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
You cannot impose yourself into someone else's country as their laws differ from yours. Calling it a "safe harbor" is a bit offensive. Like you want to poke them with a stick but local law, culture and geography doesn't allow you to do what you please with "them"..?
I'll start imposing my local laws on Americans. Then complain you wont allow me to proscecute an American, on American soil, under my terms. Say, I would be an Arab (I'm not) and I consider porn-watching criminal and punishble by death. (I've had to write a report on Saudi servers of a client once, where someone downloaded porn hoping we wouldn't login on those servers. Which became locally a criminal case punishable by death. No joke.)
As long you do not have a consensus, globally or the on what "cyber criminality" is, and the severity which it should be prosecuted and make it equally enforcable (legal backing) this is impossible. Once you have this consensus, globally, there would be no "safe harbor" anymore.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Why do Americans always seem to have this attitude?
Because we value our liberty and sovereignty more than most other countries?
I mean for God's sake, what possible objection could the US have against a treaty aiming to prevent the organised sale of children into slavery and child prostitution??
Because that's not all it does and many Americans hold legitimate concerns about it's passages regarding economic, social and cultural "rights" and are worried that it would intrude into the parent->child relationship?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.