Recent internet ructions involving … “viruspam”? – is that the word, do you think? – have prompted understandable calls for greater government oversite of the internet:
The teenager accused of creating a version of the Blaster worm that infected computer systems across the world last week has been arrested. SoBig.F, an e-mail virus unleashed on the Internet just as Blaster was being stamped out, is expected to expire next week.
But all is far from quiet on the electronic frontier. Security experts are already preparing for SoBig.G. Another worm may already be squirming through newly discovered flaws in computer operating systems. And in the moments between epidemics, the Internet’s more run-of-the-mill annoyances — spam, scams and spyware — can be counted on to keep users on edge.
The Internet has become a vital part of commerce and culture, but it is still a free-for-all when it comes to facing computer meltdowns. As America’s 156 million Internet users brace for the next round of digital vandalism, some experts say that it is time for the government to bolster a basic sense of stability in cyberspace that societies expect from their critical public resources.
The problem being, of course, that catching the miscreants who do these dirty internet deeds is the devil of a job and could, once the effort is put firmly in place with a huge George W. Bush type mega-budget, result in a whole new raft of excuses for spying on all of us, because how else do you catch these damn people?
The basic problem of “viruspam” is that you do, after a fashion, consent to accept it, same as you agree to accept junk mail of the old-fashioned sort. That makes it damn near impossible to detect – detect in the policeman sense of catching the bastards. Detectable crime usually involves an unwilling victim, and often an unwilling victim who registers the fact of the crime having been committed pretty much at the moment it happens. “Cybercrime”, if crime it be, is not like that. Not only is it infuriating and destructive in and of itself, it is doubly destructive because of the measures “needed” to put a stop to it.
