The Cynic Express(ed) 2.23: Here's the Important Rant You Requested!

     So the Melissa virus flashed in its pan some weeks back. Using the ultra-latest in privacy invasion technology which only weeks before was being decried as the advent of the New Microsoft Order, authorities caught up with David Smith, whom everyone calls the author of the Melissa virus and no one wastes time with the extra word "alleged." In not doing so, everyone has clicked on both the "Trust Microsoft" and "Trust the Government" buttons simultaneously. Everyone is far braver than I am.

     Now that David Smith has been captured and branded the "'Melissa' mastermind" by people, such as abcnews.com, who have no clue how little masterminding it takes to concoct a macro virus, he goes on trial for interruption of public communications, conspiracy, and theft of computer service. He could get up to 40 years in jail for a little patch of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, which is almost a real programming language). Let me spell it out for you. F-O-R-T-Y Y-EA-R-S.

     Let me think. Do I think it's a good idea to stack this rather dumpy and probably slightly geeky fellow into a federal penitentiary until he's seventy? More importantly, do I want to pay for the next forty years of his life? Um, no thank you, can you please pass the next dumb idea?

     After all, the punishment hardly fits the crime. I understand Smith clogged up a lot of Fortune 500 companies' e-mail systems and inconvenienced some of their six figure network administrators. After all, I should hardly expect them to have the foresight for a couple of licenses for Norton's Anti-Virus and a little e-mail training etiquette, and heaven forbid they spend time building system redundancy or contingency plans. After all, they're busy building bandwidth for the weekly Doom Deathmatches with the development department and talking with the headhunters on line three.

     But Smith did no real harm. His little macro didn't even delete any files. This cynic's a little bearish on sentencing people for committing crimes that did not directly threaten or harm other people to the penitentiary. Save the hard time for people who hurt other people. Save the money, increase the number of people who can vote, and bring our national prison population back under three times the population of the city of St. Louis. But that's another rant.

     I know exactly what the senatorial aide who composed this little obra was thinking, other than "This'll help the boss's Tough On Crime campaign." That it would be good to make a terrorist or foreign agent who tries to bring the public communications systems down a felon and to give the government the opportunity to prosecute the Boris or Natasha. Somehow, though, I think that if someone perpetrates a serious attack against the communications grid, we've got bigger things to worry about. And in a war situation, Boris and Natasha should fall under the Geneva Convention if they attack us. Unless, of course, that's part of the special "Since It Was Done To Us" exemptions.

     Instead, prosecutors can try to throw David Smith into prison for forty years. Probably a life sentence; it certainly seems that way to those of us under eighty. Of course, some will argue that the prosecutors won't, so the situation's okay. I'm argue that it's not just wrong that they might do, but that they CAN.

     I'm also afraid that David Smith will get a little bit of a raw deal because it's 1999 and because he bothered financially abled corporations. Robert Morris, who acted as the Guinea pig for these laws when he loosed a worm on the Internet in 1988 and wreaked similar havoc on the unmonied universities, received a sentence of three months of probation, some community service time, and a fine. Anything more for David Smith is Setting An Example at David Smith's expense. At the cost, possibly, of his very life.

     Maybe I am just cynical, but I have sympathy for the imp. He probably even felt clever for a couple of minutes.