Some cybernerd managed to enlist a number of innocent, third-party computers (do you know where your online golem is tonight?) to help him tie up the servers of a several big web providers (eBay, Yahoo!) last Tuesday.
This brought a predictable outcry from the gang who busy themselves rooting out new problems for our burgeoning police-state to solve. The talking heads on Sunday TV last week kept referring to this new and dastardly brand of "cybercrime," while a breathless wire service informed us: "The Justice Department and FBI chiefs promise Congress a full-court press against cybercriminals. ... Attorney General Janet Reno calls it 'one of the most critical issues that law enforcement has ever faced.' "
The Manson family? Nazi saboteurs? The St. Valentine's Day Massacre? All pale, apparently, before this new threat to our electronic tranquility.
Pardon us while we get real. If this was a "crime," can someone cite the appropriate felony statute? Imagine for a moment that some grass-roots political organization gets it into its collectively muddled head to take offense at one of the many national catalog houses that sells draperies and other dry goods via your not-so-newfangled technical marvel -- the toll-free 800 line.
The reason for their hypothetical outrage doesn't matter for purposes of this discussion. Perhaps the do-gooders object to the sale of goods manufactured with Chinese prison labor, or footgear sewn by children in Thailand (without which jobs the children in question would probably be sold into prostitution.)
Whatever the cause, the do-gooders start calling each other up, conspiring to all dial that 800 number next Tuesday night and tie up the evil corporation's phone banks, asking the operators to figure out how much it would cost to ship a shower curtain to Nepal.
Regular customers can't get through, and the firm loses hundreds of grand in revenues.
Legal recourse? In theory the organizers could face a civil suit, seeking recompense for the actual dollars lost.
But in real life, most corporate CEOs would either ignore the demonstrators and hope they go away, or else assign a PR flack to engage them in an earnest and heartfelt "discourse" designed to demonstrate "Message: Your concerns matter to us, and we intend to keep forming committees and talking about this until ... well, until you go away."
Instead, in this case, the president's Working Group on Unlawful Conduct now proposes a new Federal Intrusion Detection Network (FIDNet) to catch evil hackers by "monitoring flows of electronic data." Care to guess how many new "officers" it would take to read all the nation's e-mail in search of unwelcome contacts? And would that include asking a gal for a date after she's turned you down twice?
In fact, this uninvited prankster has performed for these start-up corporations the kind of rigorous security check for which they might normally expect to pay good money.
Didn't former Navy SEAL Richard Marcinko "break in" as a novelist describing the way his unit was sent abroad to test the vaunted security of such fortress-like U.S. installations as our embassy in London -- demonstrating to widespread embarrassment that any stranger carrying a clipboard could easily penetrate into the most sensitive bowels of the building through the simple expedient of slipping in through the unlocked "smokers' patio" door?
Most web sites -- and even our home Macs and PCs -- have abysmal security. The web businesses are duly warned they need to develop faster and smarter filters to isolate and deal with non-productive log-ons.
Whereas, in the case of the private computer user, a lot of us who've been "too busy" to look into encryption and other security measures are now on notice. The federal government's recent move to stop classifying encryption technology as a controlled "armament" is a good first step. Now it's time to set aside control-freak concerns and make sure such products are widely available to every American consumer.
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The citizens of little Elko, Nev., continue to fight the efforts of the federals to close off more and more of Nevada to public access under one guise or another.
Republican senate hopeful and former Congressman John Ensign flew up to the state's northeast corner to attend a Lincoln Day dinner last week, and was quoted in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call telling the enthusiastic locals "Most of what the federal government does is unconstitutional," that "If we don't stand up out here in Elko, across Nevada and across America, they are going to continue to get more and more power and give less and less liberty."
Roll Call reporter John Mercurio writes that Democrats seized on Ensign's comments "as the latest evidence of what they say are his far-right leanings." Jim Jordan, political director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, went further, saying the remark "calls into question both Ensign's fitness for office and his emotional stability."
The predictable outrage of statists, finding themselves confronted with a populace finally willing to stand up for some of its rights, deserves two brief comments:
1) I wish. Though veterinarian John Ensign is decent enough as your politicians go, when the time comes to vote on all those pork-filled appropriations bills next year, count on Mr. Ensign to go along and get along with the rest of the Republicrat gang, voting thumbs-up for virtually every extraconstitutional program on the wish-list.
2) On the other hand, if it turns out Mr. Ensign really means what he says, and now resists loud urgings to spend the next two weeks backpedaling from the plain truth he spoke in Elko, then he will not merely be elected our next U.S. senator -- most of Nevada would waive the election right now, and appoint him by acclamation.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available at 1-800-244-2224.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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