The law with all the possible ramifications is a horror, to all those living and working in the USA. It is a very prudent example of the more recent American adventures where politics (read popularity contests) are influencing logic thought processes. Forget the terrorism and the wide grounds on which any American with a computer can now be kept detained for immoral long times trying to prove he did not send out that virus but was a victim himself. Forget the researcher/security analyst who has some programs that would allow him to analyze any hack of a computer, he will be caught and prosecuted, after all he has the weapon. Guns are allowed, but computer tools not, I wonder which ones are the easiest to perform act of terrorism with, not to count bombs and other heavy stuff. What is clear is that it for now is a American matter, which only shows that the land of the free isn't half as free as it is pertaining to be. It gives space to catch anyone writing a compromising e-mail but leaves open a far bigger plague: the fraudulent use of credit cards. Thousand of "smaller" companies on the internet have lost their merchant accounts, massive amounts of money due to this, yet the American governement has yet to do anything about it. 57 cases in one month, brought to the attention of the secret service (yes they are handling those cases) made it painfully clear that action against those kinds of crime were not to be exepected since the mass amount of under 250 thousand dollar and more important things like protecting a politician on the caimpaigntrail were of a higher priority. A Russian who only demonstrated obvious weaknesses in software is still detained for speaking his peace and not allowed to go home, yet the millions of american credit cards used fraudulent are not investigated. The Europeans had similar proposals as law, they all failed, seemingly politicians, in most parts of europe at least, have more knowledge of civil rights then the American ones. It does not take a rocket scientist to see that a law like this is an infringement on any civil right, and without other grounds then to allow widespread tapping, forcing ISP's to run their monitoring software as still is done on phone-calls all over the states. Most of the surrounding wording, inlcuding the illegality of software or tools to hack or crack are either made for the supporting industries or to be taken at less then face value, after all if you want something that would go down bad (blanket sniffing) you dress it up in something that goes well (anti-terrorist act). Remind me not to visit the states in years to come and to keep my business outside of the USA, where laws do not make me responsible for the sites i host, and will not force me to run software that threads on privacy acts and civil rights. How can i hold up a privacy act when people register a domain, or rent webspace or shells if on the other hand i can be forced to allow American lawenforcement agencies to run sniffing devices and software on my servers. I promise fredom of speech, regardless whether i like the content, ppl are allowed to post what they want, they are entiteld to an opinion, and i do mostcertainly not wish to change that stance. As such we will not co-operate ever with any law enforcement agency , who with some more knowledge would not need my servers to wire-tap but could do it elsewhere like in the suspects computer. The word terrorist goes down well in the USA atm, it covers a whole range of outrageous acts proposed to congres, the waiting is for the detention of all arabs and muslims in camps like the Germans and Japanese Americans had to endure some 60 years ago, McCarthy cam much later... l'histoire ce repete abel wisman www.able-towers.com www.url.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Oct 16 2001 - 09:31:16 PDT