March
22nd,
2004
one thing that occurred to me recently when reading a security mailing list is the extent to which analogies to the physical world tend to be drawn as soon as the subject of computer crime starts being discussed. For example whenever a discussion of the legality of port scanning starts you can generally expect to see people starting to compare it to "rattling the doors on a house".
It seems to me that this is a good indication of the lack of laws regarding Internet/computer crime, as people can't definitively say whether something is or is not illegal so they are forced to draw analogies, which are unlikely to ever be 100% accurate.