Michael Regan wrote: > I often find Crispin's comments informative and well thought out, but > in this case I feel he is a bit off base especially when it comes to > drug laws and search laws. This is not the forum for a debate on drug laws vs. civil liberties. If anything, they are relevant only as instructive examples of what happens when law enforcement is given powerful authority without a lot of checks and balances. Relevant to CRIME, I think it is important to keep that in mind with respect to evidentiary rules for computer crimes. There are rather strict rules on the handling computer forensic data: basically, don't touch it. If you mess with it, then it isn't evidence any more. This is very inconvenient, but IMHO very necessary. Computer forensic evidence is vastly easier to forge than physical evidence. Similarly, there is very good reason to require very formal search warrants before e-mail & web traffic can be tapped for law enforcement purposes. It is trivial to impersonate someone on the net; if someone wanted me in jail, and warrants with good propbable cause were not required to tap my web surfing habits, it would be very easy to fake up a web log showing me downloading kiddie porn. You don't even have to fake the logs: you just go download the kiddie porn, and spoof the IP address so it looks like I did it. The probable cause requirement puts a barrier in the way of this kind of malfeasance: law enforcement has to come up with some kind of reason to believe I am doing nasty things before any evidence they gather that suggests I'm doing those nasty things becomes valid. "It's a good thing." -- Martha Stewart :) Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. Chief Scientist, WireX http://wirex.com/~crispin/ Security Hardened Linux Distribution: http://immunix.org Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed Aug 28 2002 - 16:12:53 PDT