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Why 'Cyber Crime' Should Just Be Called 'Crime'
netzar writes "CAUSE executive director Neil Schwartzman, in a post on CircleID, urges governments and law enforcement to treat cyber crime as what it really is: 'crime': 'When someone is mugged, harassed, kidnapped or raped on a sidewalk, we don't call it "sidewalk crime" and call for new laws to regulate sidewalks. It is crime, and those who commit crimes are subject to the full force of the law. For too long, people have referred to spam in dismissive terms: just hit delete, some say, or let the filters take care of it. Others — most of us, in fact — refer to phishing, which is the first step in theft of real money from real people and institutions, as "cyber crime." It's time for that to stop... This isn't just email. This isn't a war. This isn't "cyber." This is crime.'"
Great idea. It will happen about the same time that "white collar crimes" are treated the same as mugging or burglary.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Because we're all fed up with the cyber-whatever headlines.
The point is to identify a crime committed in a particular way as new kind of crime. Having a different category allows one to expand governmental powers, particularly in the form of regulatory agencies, beyond the bounds of what the public would normally accept for the unqualified crime.
We call it cyber-crime because of the special skills and knowledge required to appropriately investigate and prosecute it. I really don't want a beat cop who makes arrests for street muggings responsible for investigating high-tech crime. Specially trained members of law enforcement will probably be required to enforce especially complex types of crime.
What are our elected representatives going to do to convince us they deserve to keep being paid by our tax dollars if they can't make themselves look busy by making things illegaler?!?!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Local cops generally don't care about contractual fraud unless you deliver a complete evidence package all tied up with a nice blue ribbon. They'll call it "civil" and blow you off.
Only big cases get any attention.
There is enough violence to keep the cops busy.
When you are truly in an IT job, you are all of them. After you're done fixing the plumbing that is.
Should we also stop calling crime that affects property "property crime", and crime that involves violent acts "violent crime", and crime that involves criminal organizations "organized crime".
Because, you know, all that is crime, too. In fact, as with "cyber-crime", the fact that it is crime is why it has "crime" in its name. Adding a more specific adjective to a noun doesn't negate the basic meaning of a noun.
What are you guys on about?
Street crime is a loose term for criminal offences taking place in public places. It has commonly been used for the term mugging around here.
There is a great distinction in Cyber Crime - like they mention phishing. If I had gone door to door pretending to be with your bank and requested any of your credit cards, you'd either be considered an idiot and/or I could be charged with some form of fraud. Fraud is it's own kind of Crime - it has it's own laws regarding it, why can't Cyber stuff be the same?
I get what you're trying to say, people don't seem to take "Cyber Crime" as serious as regular crime, but they are very different, in many ways, and segregation already exists in other forms of Law.
There is enough violence to keep the cops busy.
Don't forget all those damn kids and their "wacky baccy"!!!
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
There is absolutely nothing illegal about me turning to the person next to me and asking them for their banking credentials. The only difference is that if I do it in real life, they will laugh at me. If I do it on the internet, I am more likely to succeed.
On another tangent here, the author misses the point. The real crime is that the banks make it too easy for someone other than the account holder to access the account. They make it too easy to get credit based on stolen credentials. The banks should demand token based authentication for online transactions. There are solutions that will send a one time PIN to a smart phone so a separate dongle isn't even necessary. The mechanisms for nearly bullet proof online commerce are available. The system is simply setup in a way that it is more affordable to write off fraud than it is to actively combat it.
All distinctions involving crime, including (perhaps most especially!) the distinction between "crime" and "not-crime", are political in nature.
It is less easy to see a difference between murdering someone say to steal their money and murdering someone because they are homosexual.
Is there? Both cases the person is dead...Does someone who just killed a person for $5 in pocket change deserve to get less punishment, just because his motivations were different?
In any event, the whole manslaughter/murder 1st/2nd/3rd provides more than enough granularity for sentencing purposes.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
In other places it may be grand theft auto, plus circumvention of an access control device (DMCA) with keys that have software chips in them.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
How do you codify this better understanding? Write it into a law? Or do you just let each individual cop, prosecutor, judge, and jury apply their own 'better understanding'?
Isn't that how it works now? Cop makes an arrest based on his interpretation of the law. Prosecutor decides if there is a case and then makes that case. Judge listens to the prosecutor's case and your lawyer's case, ensuring legal requirements are met and giving instructions to the jury. Jury makes a decision based on what they heard in court (and their own biases). A court ruling is given. A precedent is set. The next time this hits a court, that precedent will be referenced.
While I appreciate the desire to improve our legal framework, the reality is that legal framework is rather ponderous and slow to catch up with the pace of technology. Laws take time to write. And they go through enough hands that your intent isn't always what gets codified. Laws are rarely cut-and-dry and often interpreted anyway. So what you end up with is a constantly out-of-date yet increasingly complex system of law full of loopholes and pitfalls that only an expert can hope to keep up with, much less understand.