'cyber murder'

[Metgod]

Absurd. Absolutely absurd. Cyber murder.. yeah... right.
Although that does remind me of a time Cobby and I were chatting and he saw a website that 'sells' murders... so basically they are a hit man.. Anyways, this statute by the us gov't is stupid. Not only that, it's scary. It doesn't make sense, does it ? I don't think so in slightest. And let's not forget that there are always loop holes (one person here mentions it...)

Scary and absurd. Bush is so fucking stupid, I swear to god..
The stuff he has been doing in the name of 'anti-terrorism'. Ugh, fucking moron.

Anyways... have a read.


http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/28274.html

By Kevin Poulsen
SecurityFocus Online
Posted: 25/11/2002

A genuine cyber murder may never happen outside the pages of tabloid
newspapers and Tom Clancy novels, but defense attorneys say that won't
keep federal prosecutors from getting some mileage out of a provision
in the newly-passed Homeland Security bill that dictates a maximum
sentence of life imprisonment without parole for computer hackers with
homicide in their hearts.

One of many information security and cybercrime measures in the
484-page bill - which won final approval in the Senate Tuesday - the
life sentence is reserved for those who deliberately transmit a
program, information, code, or command that impairs the performance of
a computer or modifies its data without authorization, "if the
offender knowingly or recklessly causes or attempts to cause death".

If the attacker only causes or attempts to cause bodily injury through
hacking, the crime carries a 20-year sentence.

While it sounds straightforward enough, defense attorneys who've
worked on significant hacking cases worry that many aspects of
computer crime law remain too unclear to provide a sound anchor for as
weighty a sentence as life imprisonment, and they say the new
provisions add more confusion to a still-evolving area of law.

"You can drive a truck through the ambiguities in that language," says
Donald Randolph, the Los Angeles criminal defense attorney who
represented hacker Kevin Mitnick. "It's a daunting prospect to address
this when you have words like 'attempts to cause' and 'recklessly.' I
could see prosecutors arguing that the term 'reckless' defines every
instance of hacking."

"While it's completely understandable that society would want to
impose a life sentence for any kind of murder... what we've done is
attached that idea to the underlying vagueness of the anti-hacking
law, and there are a lot of things that are not clear in the law and
not clear in the statute," says Jennifer Granick, director of Stanford
Law School's Center for Internet and Society, and defense attorney in
several federal hacker cases. "Technology is progressing so rapidly...  
to attach a life sentence to an area of the law that is still in the
earliest stages of the development is dangerous."

Plea Bargains

Notwithstanding apocryphal reports of hackers changing blood types at
a New York hospital, or a twelve-year-old boy coming within keystrokes
of opening the floodgates at an Arizona dam, no cases of attempted
cyber murder or cyber terrorism have been reliably reported. But the
defense lawyers believe that the new law -- or the threat of it --
will play a significant role in conventional, non-lethal, hacker
cases.

"I'll be used to get guilty pleas," says Granick. "People will be
afraid that they're going to get the life sentence so they'll take a
deal for less than life, and give up their right to appeal and to test
the law."

Other legal experts disagree. "I doubt it," says Orin Kerr, a cyber
law professor at George Washington University Law School, and a former
attorney with the Justice Department's computer crime section. Kerr
believes prosecutors won't use the attempted murder language to
squeeze guilty pleas out of hackers, and says the new provision will
most likely gather dust -- an unused and overlooked curiosity in the
law books.

"The practical effect of this is almost none," says Kerr. "It's
probably mostly symbolic -- perhaps useful in a case of a terrorist
act of computer hacking designed to cause a lot of deaths, in which
case it would give the federal government jurisdiction."

"Forgive me for being pessimistic after 28 years as a criminal defense
attorney... but I would say it will absolutely, positively be used to
compel plea bargains," counters Randolph. "That's the name of the game
in 90% of the prosecutions I'm involved in."

[wilnix]

Metty swore to god.

Wilnix

[Metgod]

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