Steve Bellovin writes:
I'm not defending a 15 year sentence; it's far too harsh. But I strongly disagree with ``why outlawing it in the first place? What is crypto for?'' By analogy, why outlaw burglary? After all, what are safes and alarms for?
I concur with Tim May's comments that a service is not the same thing as property. Nor, going further, is physical property the same as intellectual property. We have a long legal tradition of protecting physical property. It's the kind of thing people can clearly understand, morally and legally. Intellectual property is often more nebulous. Protecting new kinds of services at the whim of a business (such as, for example, defining some string of bits as an "access code" and instituting stiff penalties for "unauthorized use" of that code, which ends up meaning whatever the offended party wants it to mean) is a going way too far, putting all of us at risk of extreme legal jeoapady at the whim of bureaucrats, lawyers, and jurors who couldn't tell an access code from a mail header. For a business to lobby that some new and flawed system be protected at taxpayer expense is a gross abuse of the law. To criminalize an entire group of people, such as hackers, is morally bankrupt and turns the law into an illegitimate farce. We have quite enough crimes on the books that are hardly being enforced right now; the last thing we need is to define new crimes out of thin air because some jerks couldn't be bothered to take the precautions necessary for the success of their business. Criminalization of business intelligence is a great recipe for destroying our civil rights and bankrupting the government. Jim Hart chaos.bsu.edu