Revenge of the Internet gods

By Raja M

NEW DELHI: When a U.S. judge in July stayed an order plugging Napster, he sent shivers up the world's entertainment-industry spine.

Napster makes possible downloading of digitized music from one computer hard drive to another. It's the music industry's scariest nightmare.

Napster has shifted piracy to piracy-enabling. It's like a pirate providing the know-how, but disclaiming any responsibility to what is being pirated. With a few billion dollars at stake, the music industry is screaming intellectual property theft and hoping for some judicial mercy.

It isn't just music alone. Films, books, articles, paintings, credit card numbers, Internet accounts et all come under threat. Stephen King, with his new US$-1 a chapter Internet book, might have asked for more headaches than he could handle. The future of such e-commerce enterprise hangs hard on the sharpness of laws legislatures across the world are scrambling now to enact.

In the Internet world that rah-rahs hackers and crackers (supposedly the less malignant variety of breakers-in), intellectual property rights earn little respect and notice. That's only at the second level. The basic level already sees plenty of content matter-pinching, whether from website to website, or from off-line sources. Some amount of corruption is inevitable. But the Internet danger is glorifying the corruption.

The problem is the corruption as seen from different perspectives. The hacker culture, at its respectable best, wants everything in the Internet to be freely available. Time magazine in a June issue, quoted a 23-year-old Clarke believing, copyright is a crutch. Its inherent in nature that information wants to be free.

Whether its the Clarke types or Ma Nature more interested in information being bill-free, the point is a growing tribe of young technologists believing creative mental efforts should be rendered as a social service. This British youngster's claim to fame is creating the Freenet, one up on Napster in that it allows for file swapping with anonymity.

Cheerfulness of youth doesn't care much beyond how much fun and mayhem can be had out of the establishment (read as anyone with any rules). But serious worries emerge about how much of a dream-come-true-system Freenet can be to criminals like child molesters, terrorists and to money-laundering dhobis escaping monitoring of law enforcement agencies.

The Clarke school of thought still doesn't care. Technology that enables information flow can't be judged by potential misuse, it believes.

So, says Clarke, information should be available as free as the air we breathe. Creative merchants like musicians, he suggests, can make their money in other ways. Like selling merchandise like T-shirts or even donations from appreciative and more charitable-minded fans. Stephen King isn't going to love this idea.

The root of the problem is the indulgence and tolerance international society has to the Clarke types, hackers, virus creators and other thieving elements of the Internet citizenry. Someone pinching a password or breaking into a site has to be seen the same way as someone forging a signature or breaking into a house. Why let the Internet variety of law-breaker get away with a rap on the knuckles?

That's one drawback Internet-related laws could have. Trying to distinguish between online and offline crimes can end in diminishing the threat potential of one against the other. As more of the worlds economy and life styles get Internet-linked, more of property and privacy demands protection from anarchists having no respect for logic behind laws.

Deterrent should be in judging the criminal intent, whether the illegal access was gained online or offline should make no difference. If anything, the off-line lawbreaker should be slammed with harsher deterrents.

Someone breaking into my e-mail box represents a greater threat to my privacy than someone reading my paper mail, simply because the former can invade my privacy more easily and more often.

Likewise, young nerds hacking into national defense computers are being let off easily, sending exactly the wrong encouragement to similar aspirants. Imagine a document stealer caught in a highly security sensitive area of a military headquarters being let off with a fine and a scolding.

The problem is the online crime not being seen as being as threatening, if not more so.

The height of irony was a recent hackers' underground conference in the United States being graced by the assistant secretary of defense pleading for the more illustrious of the hacker tribe to join the army. The principle of setting a thief to catch a thief might make sound strategy, but it also legitimizes thieving expertise.

The hackers' mentality couldn't care. Reports mention the assistant secretary was both booed and received with awe. But until governments think of ways to debunk and severely discourage any perceived romance in hacking, the trillions of dollars-worth of projected e-commerce will only remain projected pipe dreams. Not many are going to disclose credit-card numbers and personal information online. I definitely won't be creating potential for trouble.

In a way, the hackers, crackers and virus-creating addicts represent the great irony of the Internet. These anarchists could be the revenge of the Internet gods, the pioneering builders who believed the Internet should represent everything that is free, liberal and non-commercial about the human race. Many of the Internet pioneers have long since packed their disillusionment and left. Their ghosts remain as the spirit driving the Internet anarchists, to whom a password or a firewall is like a fluorescent red flag to a mad bull.

Still, the law of the land has to prevail, be it Internet- connected or not.And if privacy and private property is threatened, for just the heck of it, then knuckle-rapping and sermonizing won't help.

To begin with, the hacker tribe first needs to be dealt with as anti-social elements, than romanticized as anti-establishment heroes. In a saner world, Napster and young Clarke would have been arrested for being accessories to crime.

The author is a freelance writer.

-- The statesmen / Asia News Network