The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
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Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
#2War on Privacy is the new War on Drugs.
Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
#3If US government were the world's leading producer of drugs for sale everywhere the analogy would be more fitting.
Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
#4> It’s time for the government to learn from its failed 20th century experiment over-punishing drugs and start making sensible decisions about high-tech punishment in the 21st century.
I'm not gonna hold my breath.
Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
#5Note that a lot of the work we do every day, in development or devops or normal administration, can probably be presented to a layperson as "hacking". Especially as we promote services which reduce the average person to a bunch of database records and take away their middle-class job and parade about in our buses and whatnot, we do not engender much love from the common person.
This is a great way of the .gov getting the tech sector back under control, and reminding it of its place. Be careful folks. :(
Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
#6The government gives harsher sentences to hackers than many rapists. This is because it is actually afraid of hackers. Hackers hold power that petty criminals do not. The sentences for hackers are completely ridiculous because they are created by fear.
Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
#7This article makes an important point about the brokenness of CFAA sentencing, but it (or Wired's editors) do the point a disservice by making an absolutely hyperbolic claim.
The "War On Drugs" has imprisoned literally millions of people, and done so in a fashion that is both racist (minorities are far more likely to be imprisoned for a drug offense) and classist (wealthy defendants are unlikely to be imprisoned for casual offenses). Furthermore, persecution of drug users targets actions people take that cause debatable harm to society.
If[f] Keys, who is accused of deliberately enabling Anonymous to vandalize the front page of the front page of one of the largest newspapers in the world, is shown to have done the things spelled out in the warrant, then prosecutors will have shown that he:
* knowingly damaged the computer systems of Tribune Corporation
* actually caused 5 figures worth of damage
* did so by abusing a trusted position at Reuters
Keys, who as we can see has exceptional attorneys working on his case, is far more culpable for his actions than a large fraction of drug offenders.
It is indeed a very serious flaw in the CFAA that sentences can "scale with the iterator in your for loop" as your actions cause seemingly spectacular amounts of damage despite no change in your actual criminal intent.
But it's worth pointing out here that that flaw plays a minimal part in Keys potential sentencing. The base level for CFAA crimes (like most larceny and fraud charges) is 6, which merits a 0-6 month sentence. The damage "accelerator" in Keys charges adds 4 points to that level, bringing him to level 10, which is a 6-12 month sentence where conditional probation is allowed. The damage accelerators aren't what's ramping up Keys' sentence --- it's the combination of damage (at any level), cost to remediate, and abuse of his position of authority.
Here's Popehat with a fantastic post on how the sentencing guidelines actually work (I don't think they disagree with Keys' lawyer, except that Popehat goes into more detail later in the article on how sentences are reduced in practice) ---
http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence...
Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
#8The government gives harsher sentences to hackers than many rapists. This is because it is actually afraid of hackers. Hackers hold power that petty criminals do not. The sentences for hackers are completely ridiculous because they are created by fear.
> The government gives harsher sentences to hackers than many rapists. This is because it is actually afraid of hackers.
There's a simpler explanation for this. Hackers are getting harsher sentences because the crime is a more recent concept. The law prides itself on its trial-and-error approach to life.
Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
#9Unless they figure out how to use hackers to justify frisking random minorities for the crime of walking on the sidewalk, then this is not really the new War on Drugs.
The War on Drugs is a "solution" to a "problem" that white suburbia America, and their police departments, perceived. At the federal level it was driven by people attempting to protect their political interests by criminalizing the behavior they associated with groups that they felt threatened by.
Hacker Panic is working at a different level. I think that it would be more accurate to say that it is our new War on Terror.
Re: The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs
#10If US government were the world's leading producer of drugs for sale everywhere the analogy would be more fitting.