[IP] Hard time? Not for cyber criminals
OS X SUMMARY
Hard time? Not for cyber criminals
By Declan McCullagh
CNET News.com
August 16, 2004, 6:13 AM PT
URL: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-5311263.html
COMMENTARY--Jeffrey Lee Parson pleaded guilty last week to unleashing
part of the MSBlast worm attack that wreaked havoc on the Internet a
year ago. He got off easy.
...Compare Parson's sentence with the far stiffer penalties that the
government metes out to marijuana "criminals," who harm nobody and
cause no property damage. For the 2001 fiscal year, the average
sentence for a marijuana offense was 38 months in prison, according to
the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
...Morris released the first Internet worm--and was eventually
sentenced to three years' probation, 400 hours of community service and
a $10,000 fine.
...Smith, who created the Melissa virus, which clogged the Internet in
1999, was sentenced in 2002 to 20 months in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Jan de Wit, the 20-year-old living in the Netherlands who wrote the
Anna Kournikova virus, received only 150 hours of community
service--and no jail time.
Better deterrence is especially important because the FBI and other
police agencies have such a poor record of identifying the virus and
worm writers that infest the Internet's underbelly.
...Police failed to identify the author of the Slammer worm, which
threw some bank ATMs offline and knocked out a PC network at a nuclear
power plant in Ohio.
...An example: In 1999, the plant manager at LCP Chemicals of
Brunswick, Ga., was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for
illegally releasing mercury and chlorine into a nearby creek.
...Worms and viruses pollute today's Internet and cost society far more
to clean up than LCP Chemicals' toxic release.
biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's Washington, D.C., correspondent. He
chronicles the busy intersection between technology and politics.
Before that, he worked for several years as Washington bureau chief for
Wired News. He has also worked as a reporter for The Netly News, Time
magazine and HotWired.
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