February 21, 2000 New Thinking:
Cyber vigilantes
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February 21, 2000
Cyber vigilantes
By Gerry McGovern
Did you know that US banks were warned well in advance that there would be attacks against large websites but that they told nobody except other members of an Internet security organization for financial institutions?
Let’s spin that another way. You’re in a neighborhood and you see some of your neighbors boarding up their windows. They won’t tell you why they’re doing it, so you pass it off. That night a hurricane strikes.
There were no warnings on the radio, TV or in the newspapers. The emergency services were totally unprepared. But this select group of neighbors knew because they happened to be members of a specialist weather monitoring organization.
There are some profound issues at play with regard to the Internet today. Perhaps the most profound is the role of government business and citizen.
A large, powerful, media savvy voice is constantly saying that government should stay out, that it doesn’t understand the Internet, that the Internet should develop a voluntary code of conduct that is privately policed.
Individualism, liberty and freedom of speech are the colorful and emotive flags that this ‘Government-Out’ constituency vigorously waves.
Let me tell you what they are really about. They are about big business who are in themselves mini-governments, who if they could engineer it, would have no laws, no regulations, nothing in the way of making as much money as possible out of the customer.
This short-sighted greed is no good for anybody. It will ultimately ruin the Internet environment as a commercial medium, as customers get tired of having their personal information ripped off, get tired of private security vigilantes snooping in their computers, get tired of returns policies that aren’t worth the bits and bytes they were typed on.
We can’t treat the Internet as some junk yard sale, where everyone is trying to get their fingers into everyone else’s pockets, without running the risk of it turning into a junk yard.
Government has flaws; we all know that. But government is our best attempt to create institutions that allow society to be managed in a civilized manner. Without government the choice is chaos or vigilantism.
The current search for the hackers behind the major spate of website attacks is a mix of both. Scores of security firms are out looking for the culprits. Their driving objective has nothing to do with law and justice and everything to do with the hoped for PR announcement that their firm caught the nasty hacker.
Members of these firms are posing as suspects and friends of suspects in online chat rooms and other areas, to the extent that ‘suspects’ are turning up all over the place at the same time confusing everybody.
Law enforcement on the Internet is becoming a farce, and that’s not good for anybody. Internet business will suffer if consumer confidence in the medium declines. As much as we would all like to clean up politics and make government more accountable, today – right now - it is still all we’ve got.
I have no problem with big business per se, but I don’t want it ‘protecting’ my privacy and I don’t ever want it out ‘policing’ my streets.
Gerry McGovern
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