On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:14:20 EST, Lamar Owen said: > Identity theft can cause loss of life due to the stress of mopping up > afterwards.
Oh, give me a *break*. This is well off the end of the slippery slope. My car got totaled in a rear-end collision a few weeks ago. If I get so stressed dealing with my insurance company that I die of a heart attack, does that mean the guy who ran into me is guilty of murder? And for bonus points, is he guilty of *attempted* murder if I *don't* have a heart attack? No - in most jurisdictions, if I expire of a heart attack as an unforseen and unpredictable *direct* result of somebody's actions, that would maybe be manslaughter, not murder. And death during "mopping up afterwards" is *so* convoluted I don't think you could even get a win in a civil trial, where the standards of evidence are a lot lower than in criminal cases. Similarly, identity theft isn't committed with the *intent* that people will keel over - that's an unforeseeable and unpredictable result. On the other hand, *real* terrorism usually involved the *intent* that you're going to have some very messy corpses and/or fragments thereof. Let me know when you have a documented case of a DDoS launched with the *intent* of causing dead bodies in the street for the 6PM news crews, so that the populace is in fact terrrified.
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