On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Dave Sill wrote:

> jasons@... wrote:
>
> >... We need a way to help the legal system show leniency when people
> >were dumb versus being intentionally malicious.
>
> That's [why] we have judges and juries. Theoretically. In reality, as
> we all know, the system doesn't always work the way it was supposed to
> work.

But it's hard to explain technical issues (by definition), and it's
especially difficult to explain them to legislators, prosecutors, judges,
and juries. To these folks, there's no difference between what a cracker
does and what Brian West did (or what Randal did, or Dmitry Sklyarov, or
you, or me).

It isn't that these people aren't smart. But they have trouble seeing (or
believing) that someone who _does_ understand these technical issues could
be that dumb, even for a moment.

In related news, Bruce Schneier recently wrote:

The Internet is a new and strange place to lawmakers. [...] The
punishments do not fit the crimes. In the 1800s in the American West,
stealing horses was often punished by death. The extreme punishment
was because horses were so important to society, and people would not
tolerate the disruption. The Internet is becoming increasingly
important to industrialized society, and I worry that this kind of
extreme punishment will continue.

http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0108.html

We need to keep reminding ourselves and others in our field not to be
mistaken for horse thieves, and to keep educating folks outside our field
that merely looking at a horse doesn't mean that we're stealing it.

--
Tom Phoenix Perl Training and Hacking Esperanto
Randal Schwartz Case: http://www.rahul.net/jeffrey/ovs/