Bad Boys, Bad Boys Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? Bad Boys, Bad Boys repeat endlessly. We did 4) two weeks ago. Here are some more points. 5) The Bad Boys must know where you are. The general problem that Bad Boys face when policing cyberspace (and indeed the whole modern marketplace) is that it is a "target poor" environment. As we saw in the last piece, the basic tactical reality is the force ratio that can be applied to a territory. How many bodies can you deploy per unit of land to control it. Even before you consider the size of the enemy force, you have to consider the size of the territory. This same calculus applies equally to civilian law enforcement. Another basic tactical problem is what von Clausewitz in "On War" called the "fog of war." This is the very great problem of knowing exactly where your opponent is and what he is doing. Note how computers can expand the "space" to be controlled. Even before the Internet became big, the problem can be seen in this excerpt from Sterling's "Hacker Crackdown" (http://www.usfca.edu/crackdown/crack_6.html) "About twenty-five boards vanished into police custody in May 1990. As we have seen, there are an estimated 30,000 boards in America today. If we assume that one board in a hundred is up to no good with codes and cards (which rather flatters the honesty of the board-using community), then that would leave 2,975 outlaw boards untouched by Sundevil. Sundevil seized about one tenth of one percent of all computer bulletin boards in America. Seen objectively, this is something less than a comprehensive assault." Today, 30,000 web sites are created each month or so. Just logging them is hard much less ruling them. The fact is that cyberspace is so vast, that it is very hard to make much of a dent in it. Policing territory is hard enough when you can see most of it. Any city cop or soldier doing house-to-house fighting can tell you that crowded cities are harder to police than open territory. Cyberspace has the topography of madness. Much of it is invisible and it grows changes and deforms with the speed of the thoughts of the millions of its "residents." And it has a doubling rate much faster than the doubling rate of "policing hours" available to the would-be authorities. Aside from sheer size and crazy topography, cyberspace can be very hard to penetrate. We on this list are well aware of the tools of obfuscation: cryptography, false identities, remailers, proxies, etc. An even bigger factor are the features of our world that we as sophisticated users don't even think about. The strange nature of the place is hard for outsiders to grasp. The "locals" always have the strategic advantage of familiarity with a territory. The speed of technological change is also problem as is the speed of "movement" within the system. Even if the opposition had the troopies to patrol the vast new territories there are these frustrating "magical" qualities of cyberspace. You block one WWW site and its content in "teleported" within minutes to another site half a world away. You require your local ISPs to interpose a "Surfwatch" interface between your captive citizenry and the free world and some of those captives don the "invisible cape" of a proxy server to get at the content they want. Then there's the "force field" of crypto to block your investigations. None of these "magical" technologies are perfect they can be defeated (sometimes) but defeating them takes resources. And so far, the Bad Boys haven't been winning too many in cyberspace. <More Tomorrow> DCF