RE: Civil Disobedience

["br0ken halo" <x_burning () hotmail com>]

I agree that this bill is *very* unneeded...to say, to even make the 
comparison between a hacker and a terrorist is absurd! Terrosim kills 
people, hacking is a victimless crime. People go on and on about how our 
'national' infrastructure is at *grave* risk from evil hackers and that 
these evil hackers could destroy power grids, shut off our water, and cause 
the beginning of the freaking holocaust - yet have we actually seen any real 
world proof of this? This kind of thinking is only propaganda, as is the 
hacker - terrorist comparison.

Beefing up the sentences on hackers/crackers/virus writers and the like is 
complete stupidity. It's a simple 'we don't really care about how the 
problem gets fixed, as long as it does get fixed' attitude. Thats exactly 
what this bill represents. The way to defeat the script kid is through good 
security practices through solid communication and deployment of the tools 
necessary to achieve a secure computing enviroment. This includes but is not 
limited to security lists, good security information websites such as 
http://www.securityfocus.com and the like. The only way security experts and 
administrators can secure their computing enviroment is by using the same 
tools that the hackers use to break into them. When you take away these 
tools from the security experts/administrators (as well as the script kids 
who use them), you're denying them the 'civil liberty' of taking matters 
into their own hands (as well they should!) to secure their computing 
enviroment. The spread of Information and good security practices is what 
will stop hackers from commiting crimes. Not beefing up sentences.

Can you really justify sending an 18 year old kid to federal prison because 
he hacked your box?

___________________________________________________________
I live in a world of Paradox - My weakness` are your
strengths, your wisdom is my stupidity, and your victorys
are my losses, a victory that won't last.
___________________________________________________________



----Original Message Follows----
From: "pomalley(contr-ird)" <pomalley () snap org>
To: vuln-dev () securityfocus com
Subject: RE: Civil Disobedience
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 14:53:07 -0400

This is just my 2cents worth but...

Has anyone bothered to read the bill as it was passed?  The bit about
hacking being punishable by life imprisonment was removed before it passed.


http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c107:2:./temp/~c107RpB60w::



-----Original Message-----
From: Felix von Leitner [mailto:leitner () convergence de]
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 13:42
To: vuln-dev () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: Civil Disobedience

Thus spake John Thornton (jthornton () hackersdigest com):
>  I ask each and every one of you to join me in this protest.

Why not conduct port scans from the IP of the White House, Capitol, CIA,
DEA and other law enforcement agencies and see whom the FBI arrests?

This is some serious shit, people!  Not reporting is not the way to go.
This law has to be proven ineffective and harmful.  That means:

  a. computer crime must not go down, or they will think the law was
     effective
  b. computer crim must not go up, or they will make laws with even more
     severe punishment.

Talk to your representatives about this!  Explain to them that this law
makes it impossible to learn computer security from the ground up, which
means that there will be no more qualified new computer security people
in ten years, which means all the good security companies will not be in
the USA, which means less jobs, less taxes and more poverty.

Felix



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