Anonymous Squirrel wrote: > At the risk of this discussion running far afield, I think Jason and Paul > may be talking past each other. My understanding is that Jason has a point > -- corporations can't suffer the same punishment as individuals. They > aren't deprived of their freedom in prisons. The most common corporate > punishment is a fine. > > Paul's point is SOX, GLBA, and HIPAA hold individuals accountable for their > acts at corporations. > > Those two opinions are both correct, and do not contradict each other.
This is true, and important. Nonetheless, Jason seems to be almost calling for mob justice, when he says: > The only option available to the people is mob justice. Corporations can > be ruined and they can be burned to the ground, but they can't be > touched in a meaningful way through mechanisms of law. Corporate persons > are truly first-class citizens, rising above the rest of us natural > persons in importance and worth to society. Paul Schmehl is pointing out that this is false--the law can be used against corporations, to regulate the acts of corporations by making the persons who constitute their leadership personally liable in criminal court. I strongly doubt that vigilantism is an appropriate or even useful response to corporations victimizing their customers with spyware. I think that we need to start prosecuting people, and work with the law as much as we can. Vigilantism is, in this case, precisely the problem. Sony execs are pissed off at their customers violating their copyright, so they're taking the law into their own hands. This is unacceptable. Ideally, they, and anyone who fools users into installing rootkits on their systems, should be put in jail. Even if we cannot put them in jail now, because the law is to ambiguous to convict beyond reasonable doubt, the solution is to alter the law so that it can be used in this way, by passing laws to make spyware authors and execs ordering the creation and distribution of spyware more criminally liable. Sony and other companies that profit from hurting their customers want us to believe that the only way to stop them is to break the law. That defines them as legitimate and their opponents as illegitimate. When did consumer privacy advocates and activists become rebels? Society has established norms about how people are to treat one another. Executives and computer programmers at Sony have violated those norms. They are the "rebel scum," and we must use the law to stop, deter, and punish them. This, along with efforts to educate the public about social, legal, and technical measures for self-defense, will be by far the most pragmatically effective way to protect the privacy and security of "the rest of us natural persons." -Eliah _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/