| Friday,
July 20, 2001
 A
Code Red announcement from Cisco. Cisco Systems users take heed. I
sent a mailed alert message to subscribers last
night. I have mail this morning from several subscribers whose logs show
attempts to attack their systems. This thing is out there and wild and
it's well to know about it.
Air Conditioning wallah supposed to be here shortly. Otherwise nothing
to stop me from getting a real day's work done. I hope.
And indeed the air conditioner is fixed at last. Not that it is needed
today, but it's done.
I wrote this for a discussion in the SFWA forum, but perhaps it belongs
here as well. The context was the Adobe/FBI incident at DefCon, and a
reply to some heavy remarks I made to a colleague who suggested that
intellectual property thieves ought to be punished severely:
The proper remedy here is not simple, but it is
certainly not rigorous enforcement of the existing law with the
possibility of locking a hacker in a cell with an amorous and probably
diseased rapist. One need not be ironical to say this is not a good thing
to do, and may create mortal enemies, not only of the abused individual,
but also of his friends, many of whom are pretty smart cookies capable of
doing some really bad things as revenge.
I know. They write to me for advice.
As to making this a practical discussion, first
we have to agree that the law needs changing. I have not seen that
conceded yet, and my, to you too heavy handed, remarks were addressed to
that task. Once it is agreed that the law needs changing then perhaps we
can work on what changes make sense.
As for instance: there is a vast difference
between my working in your company and stealing information and then
publishing it; or my working in a government lab (which I have done) and
taking classified information which I have agreed I will not reveal under
pains and penalties I agreed to, and publishing it. I give an example: In
1964 during the Goldwater election Goldwater said we ought to bomb the Ho
Chi Minh Trail wherever it was including in Laos. Lyndon Baines Johnson,
President of these United States, said "That is the most triggerhappy
suggestion I ever heard, and shows that Goldwater is too dangerous to be
President." I had on my desk STRIKE PHOTOS of our bombing efforts on
the Ho Chi Minh Trail IN LAOS. We were already doing it, and I knew for a
fact that McNamara and Johnson knew it because they approved the targets.
I thought seriously of going public with the photos, but I did not,
because I had sworn I would not do that. I wasn't terribly worried about
consequences after the Ellsworth case. I did think it probably would not
have affected the election. Had I thought it would be crucial to the
election I don't know what I would have done. But my point is that my
action would and should have been illegal.
Now suppose I did not work for the government,
and I took some LandSat photos published by the government and enhanced
them in ways that showed we were bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Should
I be jailed for publishing the algorithm I used? I don't work for the
government and I have stolen NOTHING. I have cracked someone else's codes
and enhanced his data. Is that criminal? Should it be criminal?
I could add considerably more. Note that this was for an author's
forum. Authors by definition want intellectual property protection. But
surely there is a difference between my cracking your code, doing so from
my own resources, and my stealing your property? If your code is stupid
then why should I be jailed for publishing the algorithm for cracking a
stupid code. But almost by definition a cipher that can be cracked is a
stupid one...
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