Government scrutiny is headed our way

Curt Howland howland at Priss.com
Wed Jun 17 15:44:54 UTC 1998


> > *You* may wish to make your life more convenient by bringing
> > government force into your relationship with other network
> > providers, why by what divine right do you get to impose your
> > convenience on others by force?
> 
> What's your alternative solution?

As you later point out, a smurf attack is no different
than any other denial of service attack. Whether that
attack is done by picketters physically preventing 
customers from entering a store, or pingers preventing
network use by overloading circuits, it is *already*
prosecutable.

> > Just go ahead and filter the offenders. 
> 
> This is ok after the fact. But it doesn't work when you're under
> attack and trying to get help.

As I said, cooperation cannot be forced. It can be
promoted, but if, for an example from my experience,
Agis simply ignores your attempts at contact, what
good will working with them do anyway?

> If I was running a backbone, and I refused to help stop a Denial of Service
> attack, couldn't I be considered to be aiding and abetting the criminal who
> was performing the DoS? Couldn't I be held liable?

This precident has been set in the physical world on
many occations. So, don't wait for some idiot legislator
to write a statute whos purpose is reduntand, and which
is written by a non-net person so ends up being violently
stupid.

If you see harm, prosecute it. Anything and everything
that one person can do that harms another, even spam and
smurf denial-of-service, is already illegal. What it 
requires is not waiting for someone else to solve your
problems for you, it requires people to take charge of
their own lives.

 I mean, in this case,
> we're not talking gray areas here, like spamming and/or third-party mail
> relaying. We're talking about smurfing, an action which is clearly illegal,
> which clearly causes damage to the target network...

Exactly. I see you understand.

> IOW - I agree with Karl.

Or maybe not. Email has its limitations.

> Steven J. Sobol - Founding Member, Postmaster/Webmaster, ISP Liaison --
> Forum for Responsible & Ethical E-mail (FREE) - Dedicated to education about,
> and prevention of, Unsolicited Broadcast E-mail (UBE), also known as SPAM.
> Info: http://www.ybecker.net

Curt-

...just Curt...




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