Legislation Passed To Address Computer Crimes Essays - Misconduct

Legislation Passed To Address Computer Crimes Over the past month you could not pick up a newspaper without finding an article about the recent Denial of Service (DOS) attacks on E-commerce sites over the Internet. This increase in Internet security problems and crimes, is paving the way for tougher legislation in regards to monitoring and tracking computer hackers. We the people should ask ourselves how far we should allow the federal government to go to catch online criminals. Legislation passed to address computer crimes should be carefully written as not to give government agencies powers that would infringe on innocent computer users rights. The need for computer-related laws is undeniably necessary. Computer crimes are estimated to cost businesses billions of dollars each year throughout the United States. An accurate dollar amount cannot be compiled for losses programming companies sustain due to piracy of their software. Potential income is lost when copies of their programs are found easily via the Internet. Pirated software is distributed freely among underground Internet groups via email, File Transfer Protocols (FTP's), newsgroups and various other means. Individuals post copies of software that was either stolen from its company's producers, or that was paid for originally for a one-user license. These copies of software posted in one or more of the above-mentioned ways, allow a single copy to be downloaded by nearly any number of people out of the million that have Internet access today. Hacking does not play a role in software theft until there is a need for the code (better known as programming) of the softwar e to be reverse engineered. Software companies instill certain protections to prevent their software from being freely distributed in the above manner. Hackers remove these protections or reverse what has been written into the software to allow this software to be used by anyone possessing a copy. Piracy is just one of many reasons federal legislation is necessary, but with the advancement of computer technology there has been a rising need for protection of persons using the Internet from crimes involving computers. Hacking groups have used the Internet as a means to inflict damages against businesses, individuals, and even their own or other countries governments. Hackers use their knowledge of security flaws to exploit information or services from companies that use the Internet as a means of business. Hackers have been known to gain passwords, or access backdoors to web pages offering services such as information, product sales, or even online backing, or credit card information. Once they have gotten through security, critical or personal information stored there can be altered, erased, or used to gain cash, dependent upon the situation. Individual's private information stored on hacked web sites, whether it's their own, or businesses storing information about them on these sites, can cause numerous problems or damages to them. These problems can range from a minor inconvenience to them, or extend into serious issues if the information was relating to social security numbers, or bank and cre dit card numbers. Individuals have even had their identities used by criminals to commit illegal acts electronically, or to gain access to their victims credit and bank accounts. Governments, and their agencies are not immune to computer-related crimes; there are thousands of attacks each day on their servers that maintain massive amounts of information about people, and other critically important materials. Many hackers' sole reasons for trying to access these sites are for their own personal satisfaction to know that they could deface, obtain access to them, or basically extort any information they wanted once they are in. It is a well know fact that government computers are protected from the highest security available, and also watched over very closely, making them a very risky target for potential hackers, and computer vandals. Given all these above mentioned computer security threats and crimes, we must then try to develop laws to protect individuals that use computers for th eir means of pleasure, profit, and transfer of information. Legislation covering computer-related crimes is needed to be ever changing with new advances in technologies happening each day. Unfortunately the evolution of laws is a very slow process. It can take the government years to pass a single law offering guidelines that