Playing Patty-Cake with Hackers and Spammers. America Online today includes among its "Welcome" screen hilites "How This Hacker Ended Up in Prison":

[Joseph] Konopka, also known as "Dr. Chaos," was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for a variety of offenses, including arson, disrupting radio and television broadcasts, disabling an air traffic control system, selling counterfeit software and damaging the computer system of an Internet service provider.

Federal prison="country club". Seven years for "disrupting radio and television broadcasts, [and] disabling an air traffic control system" among other offenses? Why don't we just slap his wrist with a ruler and say sternly, "That was very bad! Don't ever do that again!"
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Another person hilited in that story is from my area. He was treated even more litely:

In a Monmouth (NJ) County Superior Court, [David L.] Smith pleaded guilty to one count of computer theft in the second degree. In a Newark, NJ, District Court, Smith ple[ ]d guilty to one federal count of computer fraud and abuse. As part of a federal plea agreement he acknowledged that the Melissa virus [that he unleashed] caused more than $80 million in damage to businesses across North America.

Smith's sentence, originally 40 years in federal prison, was reduced to 20 months and a $5,000 fine after he agreed to an undercover role with the FBI, which contributed to the capture of numerous perpetrators.

From 40 years to 20 months, less than 2 years? Why not just legalize attacks upon computers and have done with it?
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Another miscreant hilited is Howard Carmack:

From 2002 until his arrest, Carmack used 343 false e-mail accounts to send unsolicited e-mail advertisements for get-rich-quick schemes and sexual enhancers, among others.

In March, 2004, New York prosecutors succeeded in demonstrating that Carmack had distributed 825 million spam e-mails[.] A jury pronounced him guilty of forgery, identity theft and falsifying business records. Carmack received a sentence of seven years, of which he must serve a minimum three-and-a-half years.

Carmack also lost a civil lawsuit before a federal court in Atlanta. For defrauding EarthLink, eight men from New York, Ohio and Washington, D.C., he was ordered to pay damages in the amount of $16 million [yet he was] initially freed on a bail of $20,000[.]

I'm amazed he didn't flee. Perhaps the police in his jurisdiction kept him under surveillance.
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And where is he going to get $16 million? He's not. So the verdict is utterly empty and meaningless. The harm he did will never be undone, and no one will ever be made whole. Some of them may still be recovering from the harm he did when he is released from prison in little more than three years.
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The only one of the examples of "Internet villains" that AOL hilited who might be treated severely is Scott Levine,

the owner of a now defunct e-mail marketing contractor called Snipermail.com. He was arrested in Palm Beach, Fla., and extradited to Arkansas on charges of stealing by means of the Internet (hacking), private account information maintained by Little Rock-based Acxiom Corp.

The indictment [123 counts] included theft of 8.2 gigabytes of private data. He was convicted of all counts in a Little Rock federal court and is currently released on bail pending sentencing. Federal guidelines would allow up to 136 years in prison.

No sentence has in fact yet been handed down. Perhaps the Government will take theft of account information (the brief AOL story does not say what kind of information Levine stole, nor what he did with it) more seriously than it does sending out malicious viruses and spam. We'll see.
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As most of the examples hilited by AOL today show, however, the bulk of the malicious misbehavior that tens of millions of computer users suffer every day is not taken seriously by government. Uncounted Internet users have had huge amounts of data destroyed, their computers altered so badly that they had to pay hundreds of dollars each for professionals to fix them, even had their hard drives erased as caused the loss of everything on them. The Internet is clogged with spam, and attempts to defraud us arrive in our inboxes every day, but government does pretty much nothing about any of this. Why not?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,159.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:52 AM