Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 13:36:00 -0400
To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
Subject: Life in prison for hacking too stiff By YAEL LI-RON
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by aztec.asu.edu id MAA24664

<http://www.contracostatimes.com/computing/stories/o07yael_20011007.htm>

Published Sunday, October 7, 2001


Life in prison for hacking too stiff
YAEL LI-RON: USER FRIENDLY

A NEW BILL currently being considered in Congress calls for life in 
prison without a possibility of parole for people who engage in 
computer trespass (also known as hackers). Obviously, the 
Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) is the direct result of the Sept. 11 
attacks, but several organizations are already crying foul over its 
implications.

Most noticeably, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has 
publicly condemned the ATA, saying the punishment is too severe, 
potentially sending "relatively harmless pranksters" to prison for 
life. The bill treats low-level computer intrusion, already a crime 
under existing laws, as an act of terrorism.

Which means that a misguided teen-ager who engages in breaking and 
entering into a computer network somewhere will be tantamount to 
committing an act of terrorism and will go to prison forever. 
Murderers often get less than that. Yet Attorney General John 
Ashcroft is asking Congress to rush the bill's passage, which doesn't 
give us a whole lot of time to let our elected officials know how we 
feel about that bill.


The bill's retroactive

The ATA also has far-reaching implications on privacy and the Fourth 
Amendment by clearing the way for wiretaps without court orders. In 
particular, your e-mail and voicemail are not private anymore, nor 
are your Web browsing habits (the latter can be easily tracked by 
inspecting the contents of your cookies). And the proposed bill 
doesn't take any chances -- it applies retroactively, too.

The bill will no doubt hasten the wide use of the controversial 
Carnivore snoop program used by the FBI, which can crack just about 
most any encoded message posted to the Web or e-mail. Sure, we need 
to find and stop terrorists for good, but if we give up our civil 
liberties today, we'll never get them back.

The ACLU naturally joins the fight against the direction the ATA is 
taking, saying "We need to ensure that actions by our government 
uphold the principles of a democratic society, accountable government 
and international law, and that all decisions are taken in a manner 
consistent with the Constitution."


FTC's role

In a related story, FTC chairman Timothy J. Muris announced last week 
that his agency won't seek more aggressive online privacy laws, which 
the Congress last year was set to consider. In fact, according to the 
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC, www.epic.org), another 
civil-liberties watchdog, more than 200 new privacy laws have been 
proposed in Congress in the past year, and not one of them ever made 
it to a committee.

To find out more about the ATA and to find what you can do about it, 
check out the EFF's Web site (www.eff.org), where you can get a 
sample letter for forwarding to your legislator. Or visit the ACLU's 
site (www.aclu.org) for more writing on the subject and another 
letter-writing campaign. Another privacy organization, the Center for 
Democracy and Technology (www.cdt.gov) also has excellent information 
about this topic as well as an online petition you can sign.

Yael Li-Ron has been writing about computers and the Internet for 15 
years. A former magazine editor and the co-author of several how-to 
books, these days she keeps busy as a freelance writer and a 
user-interface consultant to software developers. Reach her through 
her site, www.tipx.com

©2001 Contra Costa Newspapers, Inc.


Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
---


Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues
Send a blank message to: freematt@coil.com with the words subscribe FA
on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week)
Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722  ICQ: 106212065   Archived at 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/