Date: 26 Feb 1993 00:22:00 -0500 (EST)
From: MFPORTER@DELPHI.COM
Subject: File 1--Police motivations re. computer crime

    In the wake of every law enforcement action involving hackers,
there is speculation about the motives of the police and the
government in targeting computer-related crime. As readers of CuD well
know, this topic can lead to some very wild conclusions -- The
Government must be afraid of something! They see "hackers" as a threat
to national security! The police are pawns of multi-national
corporations!

    Conclusions such as these make for exciting commentary, but in the
end they are not productive. They play sharply upon people's fears,
but they sidestep the real challenges which face the community of
computer users.

    The vast majority of the "hacker crackdown" actions and the
ongoing harassment of hackers have nothing to do with perceived
threats to national security. Most of the law enforcement actions
against hackers have consisted of cops simply trying to do their job:
protecting people from crime. This job includes protecting corporate
persons such as AT&T and the RBOCs, as well as their customers. (This
may not be the best use of our society's limited police resources, but
that's a different issue, as is the question of what should be defined
as a "crime.") To the police and prosecutors, the computer criminal is
just another criminal. In this sense, at least, in most computer-crime
cases -- as in most cases in general -- law enforcement agencies have
good intentions.

    Good intentions, however, do not mean that there is not a real
threat to the civil liberties of those who use computers and telephone
networks. From Operation Sun Devil to the still-murky incident at the
Pentagon City Mall, we all have cause for concern about the choices of
both targets and methods by those who seek to fight computer-related
crime, whatever their intentions.  Actions which are designed to deter
crime may all too easily deter honest citizens from exercising their
constitutionally protected freedoms. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis
wrote in 1928:

       Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to
       protect liberty when the Government's purposes are
       beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to
       repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The
       greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment
       by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
                              (_Olmstead v. United  States_)

    It's that lack of understanding which results in most of the
problems before us. We've all heard plenty of examples of some law
enforcement agents' lack of understanding of the computer world, be it
"underground" or otherwise.  Extreme conclusions about the
government's motives, jumped to by some members of the computer
underground, show the lack of understanding on the other side.

    Those who rely upon computers -- that is, everyone in the
developed world -- and everyone who is interested in preserving civil
liberties must work to bridge this gap in understanding. Books such as
_The Hacker Crackdown_, with its candid and fair assessment of the
events of 1990, from both sides of the fence, are an important step in
the right direction. So is the work of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, which uses the tools of law and government to educate
those in power and to challenge those who would threaten our freedom.
Paranoia and extremism, on either side, does little to help.

((The author is  an attorney in Maryland and a former systems analyst.))

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