Site defaced - what next?

Randy Edwards redwards at golgotha.net
Tue Aug 10 13:04:01 EDT 2004


 > The last thing I would want to see is the FBI or the Police grow
 > *stronger* from stuff like this. They are bad enough as it is.

   Why, just because we have the world's highest percentage of people in 
prison and the police can snatch citizen and non-citizen alike and hold them 
without charges, without access to an attorney, for as long as they want?

   I agree.  One of the things we do very poorly in the US is to weigh the 
actual damage to society against the crime being committed.  Instead, we seem 
to do knee-jerk reactions with minimum sentences and three-strikes-you're-out 
guidelines instead.

   In the case of defacing a web site, it's pretty clear that while this 
should be illegal and is annoying and costly, this is not a serious crime.  
In this case, it was a small site and the damage done is not astronomical.

   But even if it was an e-commerce site, shouldn't we expect security to be 
more thorough?  After all, banks enclose their vaults in reinforced concrete 
bunkers for a reason -- they accept that security costs money and they pay 
for it.  If they didn't pay for it, there's no doubt the criminal is still 
wrong, but would we not laugh at a bank who used a tissue paper vault?

   If the system is too costly, complicated, or time-consuming to secure, this 
points to a problem with the system; because if there's one thing we can 
always count on, it is that there will forever be twits out there.

   Locking all the twits up sounds great from a vindictive point of view, but 
as our present system clearly illustrates, we're spending ourselves into 
oblivion and warping our entire society with this approach -- and the twits 
seem more numerous now than they did fifty years ago.

 Regards,
 .
 Randy

P.S. And thanks for the after-action analysis of the break-in; it's much 
appreciated.

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