4 ms·

Victims of 'hacking' should be allowed to hack back says Texas rep

16 points by hmsimha 14y ago

jcr 14y ago
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.
- whatshisface 14y ago
  Maybe we should just say that anyone can hack anything, and that everything should be secure. Unlike in real life, an attempted but failed attack will do no damage, ever.
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  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.
pfisch 14y ago
Sounds like this guy thinks Swordfish shows an accurate depiction of hacking.
evolve2k 14y ago
Oh please please fix that font you are using, on my iPhone it looks like a badly faxed article from 1997.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  It's Trebuchet MS, a standard font on Windows/OSX, with Arial as the fallback if you don't have it...
hmsimha 14y ago
This is, as far as I'm concerned, the TL;DR: 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...? Orin Kerr: No
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
thrush 14y ago
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.
Floegipoky 14y ago
Imagine the fallout from a large DNS amplified DDoS attack under this law. I guess that would be an incentive to filter recursive lookups
oakwhiz 14y ago
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...

16 points by hmsimha 14y ago

jcr 14y ago

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.

whatshisface 14y ago
Maybe we should just say that anyone can hack anything, and that everything should be secure. Unlike in real life, an attempted but failed attack will do no damage, ever.
MichaelGG 14y ago
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.

pfisch 14y ago

Sounds like this guy thinks Swordfish shows an accurate depiction of hacking.

evolve2k 14y ago

Oh please please fix that font you are using, on my iPhone it looks like a badly faxed article from 1997.

dangrossman 14y ago
It's Trebuchet MS, a standard font on Windows/OSX, with Arial as the fallback if you don't have it...

hmsimha 14y ago

This is, as far as I'm concerned, the TL;DR: 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...? Orin Kerr: No

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

thrush 14y ago

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.

Floegipoky 14y ago

Imagine the fallout from a large DNS amplified DDoS attack under this law. I guess that would be an incentive to filter recursive lookups

oakwhiz 14y ago

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...