The Need For New Law and Lawmen

The FBI ran a series of raids called Operation Web Snare which grabbed some file sharers and others up to no good.

That’s nice, but this is like trying to empty the ocean with a sandbucket. This is a joke.

The term “spam” barely existed two years ago. In that time, it has grown to becoming 84% of all email traffic in July, of which 0.54% conformed to the CAN-SPAM Act.

You know computer crime is skyrocketing when new words like “phishing” have to be invented to describe it.

The world is moving to the Internet. So are the criminals, since the law hasn’t.

And if the Department of Justice or FBI thinks that running a project every once in a while is going to take care of the problem, they are simply mad.

The P2Pers essentially say, “Try to catch me if you can.” Whack-a-mole is catching on, big time, with lots of other groups, and the Internet is turning into a fecal hole for the average user.

Goodbye, “Freedom”

This is what you get when you have absolute freedom, when you have freedom not constrained by the rights of others, freedom not constrained by accountability for one’s actions.

That’s not freedom, that’s license, that’s anarchy. You happen to think anarchy is a good thing, well, this is what it gives you: all that spam and spyware and adware and phishing and all the rest.

But enough of that. If you want law, you have to have cops, cops capable of catching the crooks, and laws that let the cops catch the crooks.

Right now, neither law nor cop is in any shape to do anything serious to anybody. They’re both so . . . slow. So very, very slow.

And even when it does move, it catches few. So very, very few.

I can’t think of a better breeding place for criminals.

Government is going to have to realize that the old rules and especially the old timeframes will not work here. Cyberspace is no longer some techtoy, but a big and growing part of the real world, as big and real as California.

And it needs to be governed with the same kind of resources dedicated to it as is dedicated to California, but somehow governed a lot faster than California is currently governed. If old laws and institutions can’t speed up, new ones will have to be created.

The last year ought to be proof to anyone sane on the subject that anarchy doesn’t work, or rather it does the way anarchy always ends up working.

It’s time to get serious and start cleaning up Dodge. The first big step is likely to be getting rid of even the illusion of anonymity from this realm. It’s hardly a complete solution, but at least it would break the momentum of what is going on now.

It will probably get a lot worse before it gets better, but it can’t go on like this, unless we decide to give criminals the Internet.

And we won’t do that, because we can’t afford to.

Ed