"Hacker Crackdown.Part 3 LAW AND ORDER" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

course, the immediate loss of the seized goods. It is
very unlikely that any of this seized material will ever
be returned. Whether charged or not, whether
convicted or not, the perpetrators will almost surely
lack the nerve ever to ask for this stuff to be given
back.

Arrests and trials -- putting people in jail -- may
involve all kinds of formal legalities; but dealing with
the justice system is far from the only task of police.
Police do not simply arrest people. They don't
simply put people in jail. That is not how the police
perceive their jobs. Police "protect and serve."
Police "keep the peace," they "keep public order."
Like other forms of public relations, keeping public
order is not an exact science. Keeping public order
is something of an art-form.

If a group of tough-looking teenage hoodlums
was loitering on a street-corner, no one would be
surprised to see a street-cop arrive and sternly order
them to "break it up." On the contrary, the surprise
would come if one of these ne'er-do-wells stepped
briskly into a phone-booth, called a civil rights
lawyer, and instituted a civil suit in defense of his
Constitutional rights of free speech and free
assembly. But something much along this line was
one of the many anomolous outcomes of the Hacker
Crackdown.

Sundevil also carried useful "messages" for
other constituents of the electronic community.
These messages may not have been read aloud
from the Phoenix podium in front of the press corps,
but there was little mistaking their meaning. There
was a message of reassurance for the primary
victims of coding and carding: the telcos, and the
credit companies. Sundevil was greeted with joy by
the security officers of the electronic business
community. After years of high-tech harassment
and spiralling revenue losses, their complaints of
rampant outlawry were being taken seriously by law
enforcement. No more head-scratching or
dismissive shrugs; no more feeble excuses about
"lack of computer-trained officers" or the low priority
of "victimless" white-collar telecommunication
crimes.

Computer-crime experts have long believed
that computer-related offenses are drastically