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You're missing the point. Low trust societies are worse than high trust societies, because even when you take all of the appropriate security measures, those measures inherently come with costs and friction that wouldn't be necessary if there weren't untrustworthy people around. The actual perpetrators are the people directly inflicting all of the costs, both the damages when they get away with something and the security costs when people move to stop them. The naive people are indirectly responsible for the costs caused by insufficient security measures. If they weren't naive OR if there weren't scumbags around, they wouldn't get sabotaged so drastically, but no matter how cynical they are there's nothing they can do to prevent the security costs and friction forced upon them by the scumbags. There's a clear asymmetry here.
I wonder if the issue is just treating criminals as sub-human or something, the fargroup, and thus absolving them of responsibility because you're not even being thinking of them as rational agents in the interaction. They're not just some environment, like wandering into the woods and getting mauled by a bear. They're people and thus deserve blame when they inflict harm.
I think you are missing my point. To commit crime you have to have law, the DNA of the internet was always lawlessness and anarchy. It started as a warzone. The fact that meatspace has claimed control and thinks its rules apply - doesn't change the nature of the place. Hackers are not criminals - internet was created to be unrulable - well it was created to be undisruptable, but the two kinda go together. So the burden is on the defender, by default. In the real world you have the whole monopoly of violence thing that says rape is not ok. Internet was designed so that monopoly of violence is impossible. Well the governments figured this one clever trick that if they can put chokepoints and match your digital to physical identity they could break your kneecaps. But still.
Arguably the same was true in so-called meatspace for a lot of human history (or pre-history, if you prefer). Back in the day, it was arguably completely normal and unremarkable to raid a neighboring tribe, kill everyone there with the exception of a few people to be taken as slaves, etc. Since then, norms have arisen providing that the law of the jungle no longer applies in the case of physical human interaction. And we are all a lot better off as a result.
Simply put, human society started as a warzone as well. To a large extent we've gotten beyond that and in my opinion there's no reason the same thing shouldn't happen in cyberspace.
Because for that to happen you need to disable out of country communications, encryption, running unsigned software and to have state firewalls that will inspect every packet.
I think your argument here is that the proposed norms of behavior I am referring to are impracticable. (Please feel free to correct me if I misunderstood.) And to that I would respond that in the physical world there are millions of crimes committed every year, many of which go unsolved and unpunished. Nevertheless, it would be silly to just throw up our hands as a society and go back to the law of the jungle. Because we are still far better off.
Assume that we have a world in which death notes are common. France's laws can't protect you. How will you deal with the threat?
The default assumption about meatspace states is that they control a physical space, have the only say what goes in there, control the inputs and outputs. And because to commit a meatspace crime you have to be in physical proximity to the victim - it means you are at least nominally under said state power. And this arrangement works well and is easy to understand. You kill a man in Reno just to watch him die and then you go to Folsom. To commit a crime you have to overcome the state.
What does the death note change - that you could kill a man in Reno from Uganda, but there is no way the crime can be traced to you (or prevented). You totally bypass the state. In that world dying by death note because you showed your face or told someone your real name - will be classified as death by natural causes - aka stupidity.
Hacking is inevitable feature of the internet. To be able to prevent and police crimes you have to be able to control all of the infrastructure. And this is where my argument comes into play - if the state is incapable by definition to secure the cyberspace - then it is up to the sysadmins - because they have total control over what goes in their networks.
By changing my name in secret.
In any event, if I understand you correctly, your position is that it is utterly impossible to bring someone to justice for international hacking activity and therefore there's no point whatsoever in applying the criminal law to computer hacking. Is that it?
No. Cyber criminals have been brought to trial and convicted. I am saying that due to the way Internet was designed - crime prevention and defense burden is on the victim, because the state has no capacity to prevent the crime.
I don't understand this at all. If a cybercriminal is prosecuted and sent to prison, how does this not prevent crime, both by keeping the cybercriminal away from computers and by deterring those who are considering a cybercrime?
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I don't accept this framing and it's not clear why anyone should. Everything you do is subject to the laws of the place your body occupies. And there are real meat-space consequences to their actions, whether a hacker just makes a laptop battery overheat or causes a food shortage by spoiling a country's worth of meat. You wish there was some weird magical world where you can do things but those actions have no moral valence, but that is a childish desire.
Yes. And defrosting French freezers is not a crime in North Korea. This is how North Koreans say hello to each other.
No, but deliberately allowing North Koreans to remotely defrost French freezers is an act of war by North Korea against France*, and French nukes work and North Korean ones don't.
* Technically a criminal one, as an attack on the civilian food supply chain.
North Korean nukes have been successfully tested more recently than French ones.
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This would be true for "encouraging", and for some definitions of "allowing", but "allowing" has a lot of grey area. "We thought he deserved a fifth chance!" is a pretty good shield of plausible deniability in too much of the modern west, including France.
That is a French domestic case - I don't think many countries are that lackadaisical about sophisticated international criminals who get caught.
I don't understand the lackadaisical attitude toward likely recidivism in any case, so maybe I'm way off base here, but how would "international" make anybody become harsher? "Good thing for our local criminal that he's in our custody where all we'd have to do to crack down is say the word, not halfway around the world where we'd have to declare war to get him properly punished, because a declaration of war we'd totally do!" If anything I'd expect the modern west to go easier on fargroup members while the "modern" North Korea would be happy to oblige.
My claim is not that France would be more assiduous in trying to punish a Nork attacking France than a Frenchman attacking France - as you point out, the French can't punish an individual Nork in North Korea without North Korean co-operation or an unacceptable risk of nuclear war. The point I am making is that the French would be more assiduous if a Frenchman (or a foreigner operating on French territory) attacked a friendly country (and got caught, which is admittedly unlikely) than if said delinquent frog was only attacking French targets.
As a matter of international law, sovereign states are expected to prevent their territory being used to attack countries they are not at war with. At least as regards countries which are actually friendly, countries take this obligation seriously.
If you take the cynical view that states protect their own interests and not the interests of their populations, embarrassing the King on the international stage is a worse crime than violating the King's peace domestically.
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It's also subject to the laws of where the servers are, where the hardware you're messing with is. Just because NK doesn't have extradition treaties does not make this behavior ok. Defrosting freezers maliciously is morally abhorrent behavior and makes the world a worse place.
Yes. Even if you take the anarchist position, there's a big difference between making the screen display "Pwned" or whatever, versus doing malicious criminal damage.
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However, the converse also applies: the most cynical (who demand others pay more for security) impose costs when they want too much security.
This is how progressives can [correctly] accuse everyone else of imposing too many costs on the community by impeding the immigration they want, and how everyone else [correctly] can accuse progressives of imposing too many costs through failing to ensure immigrants behave themselves.
There's a meme in software about "move fast and break things". Same thing- you can either have more software faster and cheaper but having more security issues [which create cost indirectly], or you can have no software and have systems that are extremely expensive [which create cost directly].
Either one fundamentally creates a cost, but it's asymmetrically enforced, as humankind hasn't figured out how to measure much less begin to force the people who argue conservatism in a particular area to pay the opportunity cost that creates beyond "move to a land of plenty such that conservatism doesn't work".
Sure there is- you organize meanness to degrade their capabilities. Typically this requires grouping people by class- sex, race, age, nationality [Irish need not apply], social standing, g, whatever- and forcing them to pay for "being scumbags".
And the ways you might force them to pay are many- you can levy fines, imprison them (which is more a fine on their time), disenfranchise them, physically injure them, and deploy various means of scumbag-icide (from assassinations of key figures to whatever prefix for -cide you wish).
On the other hand, of course, "being scumbag" is sometimes not something one can avoid. Perhaps one is born stupid, or with some trait that make their existence untenable (including relative statuses, since human beings work that way), so either they themselves, or those with whom they can co-ordinate, will seek to take away what you have because there's no particularly attractive alternative.
The thing that complicates this analysis is the fact that "people that just want to watch the world burn" (as in this case) are always a net positive to kill, but it's not possible to ensure the social machinery that kills those people is never turned in their direction.
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Agree this is how people in Johannesburg end up living their lives shuttling in between walled security compounds and still get robbed.
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I think you're on to something. A whole bunch of the thoughts I've been thinking about posts from the last couple weeks about the ongoing Lindsey Clancy drama, AI doomerism, European Diplomats, the Cornel 7, and Spiderman: Brand New Day, all seem to be converging on a similar conclusion and I really want to explore in an effort post but it's already late and I really ought to call it a night.
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