Every government in the world is woefully negligent in refusing to impose an INTERPOL effort to crack down on cyber crime and worldwide courts impose harsh criminal sanctions on hackers.
It is time to impose ten, twenty and lifetime prison sentences for cyber crime. It should be treated as a felony crime, same as for breaking and entering, grand theft, and malicious vandalism. Yet, the crimes are rarely prosecuted, and even when found guilty, the prison sentences are often pled down to time served and probation for no longer than a few years.
That must end!
These crimes should receive hard time and ISP's that ignore the problem should also receive sanctions in civil court. That way, when someone is prosecuted for these crimes, perhaps they may find it difficult, hopefully impossible, to ever participate in the world wide web again.
Ken
That will never happen, and in my opinion it is debatable whether it should.
Firstly, I know that you yourself Ken are opposed to the invasion of privacy, and have raised heavy concerns about the google earth van that got tiny tiny fragments of certain people's internet data. If you endorse a complete effort to crack down on hacking/piracy you MUST submit to complete surveillance. There is no other option available. The reason many of these cases never get the 'time' they deserve is because the evidence rarely holds up. If you want substantial evidence the only way to do it is to collect it.
Of course the ISP's can't discriminate - they would have to keep an eye on everyone. How would you feel about every single action you make on the internet being widely available to the ISP's? All of your private information, all of your financial information etc?
Secondly, you can crack down on the baby crackers all you like (apparently, a hacker is by definition someone who is non-destructive, whereas a cracker is someone who hacks maliciously). The big boys aren't going to be brought down by their ISP. These guys can and do regularly circumvent the internet defenses born from the greatest minds in the world. They have a team of thousands and thousands at microsoft yet it takes one smart guy to write something that can destroy people's work and completely infiltrate your operating system.
Gary McKinnon, a Scottish national who is facing extradition to the US happily got into NASA, USAF, USN, US army and the Department of Defence. The US authorities have accused him of "
deleted critical files from operating systems, which shut down the US Army’s Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours, as well as deleting US Navy Weapons logs, rendering a naval base's network of 300 computers inoperable after the September 11th terrorist attacks."
This is open to debate - it is thought that the US just about made this up to justify his extradition. He maintains he was none destructive and the relevant authorities have made no evidence to UK courts to say otherwise. But get this. He did this on a 56k dialup modem and was only found out when he miscalculated a time zone and remote accessed a computer someone was actually using (for two years they knew he was in there - and they couldn't do a damn thing until he cocked up and used his own email address). He was in there 97 times on a computer working at 56k and the combined might of the entire US forces could do
nothing to stop him.
So essentially for every one you put away there's 10 to take his place.
Another potential problem is the 'Interpol' issue. The US are chasing McKinnon's extradition like nobodies business.A quick google search reveals that the majority of agressive hackers come from China and Russia. Can you see a day when China and Russia will extradite nationals to the US? There would quite literally be a war before that happened. He has aspergers syndrome. Is it right to extradite him to a country in which, by many judges and lawyers own submission is unsympathetic to medical conditions? The US offered him 18 months in US jail then repatriation to the UK if he went to America and pleaded guilty. They then refused to put that deal in writing. Yeah, sure.
Finally, hackers do have a use. You can bet your bottom dollar that US military computer security has toughened up 100 times over as a result of this. Half of our government is rightly telling the US to sod right off, and we're just about your closest allies. That says something about how effective this would be.
McKinnon didn't even do anything special. He just had a poke around on completely unsecured computers on which the operators were using default passwords. Would you rather he do it in his pursuit that the US government have found aliens? Or would you rather it be the taliban?
A couple of thoughts for now.