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From: eci386!jmm@uunet.uu.net (John Macdonald)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: IDG Hackers
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Date: 27 Nov 90 06:05:31 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 848, Message 8 of 12


|[Moderator's Note: Suppose the damage was only $24,000; or $240, or
|$24.  Then what?   PAT]

Pat, are you trying to say that it doesn't matter how much damage was
done?  The and importance and concerns are the same for $2.4M and $24?
Do you consider the offence to be identical when one person kicks over
a sand castle and another dynamites a ten story building?

Certainly it is a cause for concern when people break into a computer,
but I feel that the amount of damage actually done, if any, is an
important consideration in deterining the appropriate response for
society to take.

BellSouth's previous actions have provided a very strong precedent for
distrusting even the scale of damage when estimated by the victim.
The fact that we can be seriously be discussing the possibility that
the damage estimate is inflated by a factor of a hundred thousand is
somewhat frightening in itself.


John Macdonald    jmm@eci386


[Moderator's Note: It is not clear to me what BellSouth's actions in
their litigation have to do with the most recent case of vandalism and
burglary. Why are you trying to associate the one with the other? If
you don't like it when hackers are stereotyped or painted with one
brush then you would do well to extend the same courtesy to telcos and
computer sites. And no, the monetary value is not nearly as important
as is the nearly forgotten and frequently ignored ethical value called
'respect for the property rights of others'. I really get sick of
hearing this bologna about how hackers/phreakers are so different,
oh-so-special, such prima donnas whose only offense was that due to
their high degree of intelligence and insatiable curiosity they got
into someplace they don't belong and that the rest of us have to cater
to them rather than risk possibly traumatizing them with a jail
sentence followed by federal probation.   PAT]