On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 03:47:12PM +0000, zeno wrote: > Has anyone bothered to read http://www.securityfocus.com/news/257 ?
Yes, and I've glanced over the text of the bills too. Don't like very much about them. I think they're drafted specifically to: - allow law enforcement and law makers to be seen as quickly responding to a serious threat - opportunistically increase the surveillance powers afforded law enforcement entities While the terrorist threat is serious, a hasty response which intrudes upon the very freedoms the terrorists are attacking is NOT the answer. > While I agree website defacement should be punished harsh Why? Web site defacement is a crim akin in severity to spray-painting graffiti on a store front, and should be treated as such. It's perpetrators are usually the same group of people too; that is, bored teenagers. The only difference is that one form of vandalism is high tech and the other is low tech. It's certainly an annoyance to the people running the site, but hardly more than that. And, in the vast majority of cases, it's a very PREVENTABLE one. > I don't agree life in jail is the solution. Just another thing being > sneaked into these bills. The current anti-terrorism bill proposed by Ashcroft goes way overboard, amounting to (IMO) little more than a punishment for being both mischevious (which SHOULD be discouraged, at certain levels) and intelligent (which SHOULD NOT be discouraged, ever). It also criminalizes probably a large percentage of the people on this list, who've ever been curious about what's going on with someone else's system. RETROACTIVELY. I've said it before -- this bill is yet another example of the war on geeks. People who understand how our technology works are to be feared and punished, and that seems to be the sentiment prevailing amongst our law makers today. It's a bit unnerving. PLEASE TAKE NOTE: I AM NOT IN ANY WAY advocating or condoning breaking into systems to which you have no authorized access. Vandalism is still vandalism and should be punished accordingly. What I AM saying is that the punishment should fit the crime, and that the current trend is to punish crimes involving technology FAR more severely than their low-tech analogs. The idea that someone portscanning my web server could be considered terrorism is absolutely preposterous, and frankly scares me. I would hardly be surprised if the techies were the victims of the next Salem. I think it's already starting... -- --------------------------------------------------- Derek Martin | Unix/Linux geek [EMAIL PROTECTED] | GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu ********************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the *body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter: unsubscribe gnhlug **********************************************************
