

Victims of 'hacking' should be allowed to hack back says Texas rep - hmsimha
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130316/01560522347/rep-gohmert-wants-law-that-allows-victims-to-destroy-computers-people-who-hacked-them.shtml

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jcr
As far as I can tell, it seems Rep. Gohmert and similar want to have the
equivalent of "Stand-Your-Ground" laws on the Internet, but unfortunately,
they just don't realize that there's no way to tell who you are standing
against, so your intended self-protection could easily be intentionally
misdirected at someone else --tricking the supposed defender into being an
attacker.

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MichaelGG
Yeah, they'd end up targeting cracked servers and consumer machines running
botnets. In the best case "scenario" of a hacker facing off directly with a
sysadmin, you'd what, break something on the VM the hacker's using?

This guy must think that "destroying the hacker's computer" is the defender
sending an energy pulse over the Internet causing just the hacker's computer
to emit sparks and power off.

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hmsimha
This is, as far as I'm concerned, the TL;DR:

Rep. Gohmert: Well, I'm not sure that I would care if it destroyed a hacker's
computer completely. As long as it was confined to that hacker. Are you saying
we need to afford the hacker protection so we don't hurt him too bad?

Orin Kerr: (brief confounded look on his face) Uh... no. The difficulty is
that you don't know who the hacker is. So it might be that you think the
hacker is one person, but their routing communications... Let's say, you think
you're being hacked by a French company, or even a company in the United
States...

Rep. Gohmert: Oh and it might be the United States Government! And we don't
want to hurt them if they're snooping on our people. Is that...?

Orin Kerr: No

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pfisch
Sounds like this guy thinks Swordfish shows an accurate depiction of hacking.

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thrush
This is a poor attitude for any means of governance and order. A crime
(robbery, murder, harassment, etc...) is more than an attack on an individual,
it's an attack on the system as a whole. It's much more important that we
prevent these malicious acts from happening at all than it is that we provide
retribution in an "eye-for-an-eye" manner, and hacks are no different.

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oakwhiz
If this were allowed, I could forsee a scenario in which someone receives 1
packet from a fake source address and proceeds to DDoS that address into
oblivion while being legally protected...

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Floegipoky
Imagine the fallout from a large DNS amplified DDoS attack under this law. I
guess that would be an incentive to filter recursive lookups

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evolve2k
Oh please please fix that font you are using, on my iPhone it looks like a
badly faxed article from 1997.

~~~
dangrossman
It's Trebuchet MS, a standard font on Windows/OSX, with Arial as the fallback
if you don't have it...

