grolaw's Journal: Cyber crackdown finds 100k victims in 50 days

John Ashcroft, our fearless Attorney General, found a few minutes to task the DOJ with policing fraud on the Internet. Starting October 1, 2003 and announced on November 20, 2003 his little enforcement action netted ~124k victims and lord knows how many cons.

I'd think they could have done the same study by compiling the FTC complaints and cross-referencing them with Spamhaus' known spammer list.

What rocket science?

The law exists to protect us from criminals and to keep a civil society (e.g. nothing like what we see in the gory shoot-em-up movie / TV genre). The problem is that the cyber criminals are consuming the bandwidth available for relevant data and our community will, eventually, cease to exist or else engage in acts that are themselves illegal. Unless the application of the law to the cyber community does more to assure us of protection from the predators, the community will shift further and further away from civility. It is the Tragedy of the Commons (Garrett Hardin, Science 1968) all over again.

While we are at it, respect for the law require that the law have some validity and the way copyright is used as a bludgeon certainly does not inspire much in the way of making us feel secure.