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.
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.
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...?
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.
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...
