U.S. Government Wants to Double Prison Sentences for Hackers
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
Nothing. The FBI has no interest at all in investigating these crimes.
Unless apparently it is from a group criticizing the government. As we see in the article, that's the real crime. Not hacking a site, but the motivation. If it's to steal and commit financial fraud, the government couldn't care less. But if it's because you want to out lies and crimes told by government, then you are going to prison for a long time.
Make no mistake. This is not about the hacking itself at all.
When did copyright infringement become one of the biggest crimes one could do? It certainly seems to be on the Government's top priority list, not far below terrorism.
hacker breakins, difficult to track and prosecute hence FBI pretending to do there jobs by taking the low hanging fruit..
DHS is a cobbled-together afterthought, the bureaucratic equivalent of Mr. Oogey-Boogey from Nightmare Before Christmas, a writhing collection of squiggley little agencies held together with stitched up burlap, created as a slapdash response to 9/11.
One of those agencies is ICE, the (small) organization originally chartered with transcontinental IP enforcement.
The part of our government that is supposed to enforce organized criminal infringement of IP is enforcing infringement of IP. It seems silly to get upset that they're doing so under the banner of "DHS". You'd rather it was DOJ? They'd be doing more than seizing domains.
The feds like to go after (some) copyright infringement because politically connected industries want that.
The ideal crime, from the feds' perspective, is one that combines all three characteristics.
These forensics guys seemed to know what they're doing and had a good perspective on their priorities.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100809/17262010563.shtml
Identity theft and missing persons don't pay the bills, I guess.
Read it again, or better yet read the linked Reuters article, which RWR just re-wrote and sexed-up. There is no causal connection made between the call for increased sentence maximums and criticism of the government. The only connection made is that the two things are mentioned in the same article.
The idea that you've come away with is not based in fact, but in poor reporting.
Now, whether that's to protect consumers or creditors is a different matter...
But are there any examples of hackers not being locked up long enough? Someone who gets out after 10 years but hadn't learned their lesson and really needed 20?
1. Rehabilitation
2. Isolation (get them off the streets)
3. Revenge
4. Deterrence
- bullets
+ and
* paragraphs (two newlines between each line).
1. Specific deterrence. (deterring the individual from doing 'it' again)
2. General deterrence. (a signal to other potential criminals to 'not do it')
3. Rehabilitation / resocialisation. Giving the criminal a chance and circumstances to reconsider their way of life or state of mind, or be 'cured' from the mental illnesses or moral defects that are causing their actions.
4. Prevention. Getting people off the street.
5. Revenge for the victim.
6. Revenge for society - making the perpetrator fulfill their moral debt to society.
There are various schools in criminology, criminal psychology etc and depending on which one one subscribes to, some of the above are more important than others. An interesting (to me) development of the last years/decades is the emergency of neuropsychology, explaining people's behavior in terms of neural functioning and basically acknowledging that all actions come from the way our brains are wired. This will have huge implications in the moral aspects of punishment; it will basically nullify the concept of 'guilt' as there won't be a difference between someone who has an epileptic seizure and kicks somebody down the stairs in a spasm, killing him; and a psychopathic murderer who creeps up on a woman at night and cuts her throat. Both will come from 'neural defects', and it will require a serious redefinition of our legal concepts of 'guilt' to reconcile this state of affairs with society's more 'intuitive' concept of guilt.
Sorry for OT, it's one of my pet topics :)
Giving the government power to double their capacity to overreact because of future failures to understand technology just seems like a Bad Idea.
They can for example use victim's computer to scan and DoS .mil domains and download a random sampling of copyrighted material from various torrents.
[0] http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-04-25-wifi-warning.ht...
Floating point rounding errors could doom someone to a life sentence!
[edit] Yup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Ge...