[Operational] Internet Police

Fri Dec 10 17:37:15 UTC 2010

On 12/10/2010 11:06 AM, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> The USA Patriot act says: "activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human
> life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state,
> that (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian
> population, (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or
> coercion, or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction,
> assassination, or kidnapping, and (C) occur primarily within the territorial
> jurisdiction of the U.S."

At most, B ii applies, but if I'm not mistaken, A, B, and C must all 
occur by that statute (the giveaway is C, as it doesn't make sense as a 
single condition).

The Patriot act seems to discount foreign terrorism (unsurprising), but 
even going by A and B, the DDOS would have to be dangerous to human life 
and be illegal by US/state law, in addition to intimidating (which 
purposefully being dangerous to human life definitely falls under 
intimidation).

So attacking infrastructure (effecting traffic lights, power, air 
traffic control systems, etc) would fall under terrorism (regardless of 
attack mechanism). I don't think one could constitute the inability to 
sell a product or process a payment as life threatening. Those acts fall 
under other legal definitions.

Jack