[109386] in Cypherpunks
Gently nurturing the misguided hacker with baseball bats
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Mon Mar 22 13:00:56 1999
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 12:39:04 -0500
To: dcsb@ai.mit.edu, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net, cryptography@c2.net,
Digital Bearer Settlement List <dbs@philodox.com>
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Whit Diffie, of course, talked about this kind of thing at MIT a while ago.
I even think this particular might be apocryphal, and has possibly made the
rounds already, but for those of you who missed it, here it is.
On the net, private law will supplant public law, modulo the occasional
baseball bat. Somewhere, David Friedman is smiling...
Cheers,
RAH
--- begin forwarded text
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 10:29:38 -0500 (EST)
From: Somebody
To: rah@shipwright.com
Subject: Gently nurturing the misguided hacker
------- Start of forwarded message -------
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 13:57:42 -0500
From: Somebody else
To: Other people
Subject: Gently nurturing the misguided hacker
...with baseball bats.
It appears the kinder/gentler approach to network break-ins is falling out of
favor in the financial community.
<Somebody else's .sig>
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9901/12/cybervigilantes.idg/
...
Lou Cipher (a pseudonym of his choice) is a senior security
manager at one of the country's largest financial institutions.
"There's not a chance in hell of us going to law enforcement with
a hacker incident," he says. "They can't be trusted to do anything
about it, so it's up to us to protect ourselves."
Cipher's firm has taken self-protection to the extreme. "We have
the right to self-help - and yes, it's vigilantism," he says. "We
are drawing a line in the sand, and if any of these dweebs cross
it, we are going to protect ourselves."
Cipher says his group has management approval to do "whatever it
takes" to protect his firm's corporate network and its assets.
"We have actually gotten on a plane and visited the physical
location where the attacks began. We've broken in, stolen the
computers and left a note: 'See how it feels?' " On one occasion,
he says: "We had to resort to baseball bats. That's what these
punks will understand. Then word gets around, and we're left
alone. That's all we want, to be left alone."
------- End of forwarded message -------
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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
