Hello,
I found this important article, maybe it's the time to
have the FBI to work in the e-crime more and more.
http://www.starbanner.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040506/ZNYT05/405060313/1009/BUSINESS
Thanks,
-J
(Insert standard "Death of Internet predicted, film at 11" sound bite here)
I found this important article, maybe it's the time to
have the FBI to work in the e-crime more and more.
Then again, maybe it's not.
Where will the FBI get the budget to work on e-crime? Remember that to be good
at that takes some talent and training, and the prospective candidates can
probably get better paying jobs elsewhere, even in today's economy.
To be brutal - do we really need to declare a "War on E-Crime" when we're still
fighting a War on Terrorism and a War on Drugs?
(I'll leave it to the others in the tinfoil helmet brigade to discuss whether we should
give the FBI sufficient budget in order to be able to effectively use the various
"War on Privacy and Civil Rights" tools they've been given recently....)
How do you know they are not related.
Bora
Because academics know EVERYTHING.
Let's not talk about the links between financial fraud, drugs, and terrorism. Of course they're related...
The majority of my forensics cases involve one or more of the above "unrelated" wars. The FBI is mostly clueless when it comes to these different types of fraud, but the Secret Service most assuredly is not.
Anyone who feels compelled to complain about privacy should feel free to move to Australia - you can't take $10.00 (AUS) out of an ATM without the government knowing it. In the USA, we have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to complain about.
WOW! How quickly these threads go off-topic... 
Jamie
With the rise of extortion incidents online, there's no doubt in my
mind that we've got lots of things that relate here. You rarely ever
find one crime being done independantly of another. I mean how do you
suppose that the terrorists get their funding? Large sums of money
pass to them every year as a result of credit card fraud, identity
theft, drugs, and other similar crimes. (Now thats by no means to say
that all such stuff is associated with terrorism -- there is afterall
old fashioned organized crime -- but it's hard to deny that there is
indeed a link.)
Because academics know EVERYTHING.
What's that got to do with anything? (or are you making the rather rash and
all-too-common generalization that everybody who posts from a .edu is an
academic? Surprise - at least some sites are clued enough to keep academics in
the classroom and lab, and hire people who know something about production
environments to run the network and the big servers....)
Let's not talk about the links between financial fraud, drugs, and
terrorism. Of course they're related...
Right... my point is that "e-crime" is a *symptom* of the others - you won't
be able to do anything about e-crime until the *root* problem (fraud/drugs/terrorism)
is dealt with.
We have had enough ill-defined 'War on Election-Year-Buzzwords' (terrorism,
drugs, organized crime, illiteracy, poverty - the wars on Communism and
Inflation seem to have evaporated. I've probably missed a few...). And we
seem to do a very poor job of ever asking *why* people decide to blow us up, or
do drugs, or be poor/homeless. I don't see any reason why we'd do any better
with e-crime.....
And even if E-crime *is* a separate war we need to declare, where will we get
the resources from? Our military has long had a policy regarding the troop
strength we need, and bases it on a "We can handle 3 small conflicts, or 1
large and one small, and we need to avoid being in 2 major conflicts at once"
type of ruleset. Take a look how many billions of dollars a month we're
collectively hemorrhaging in Iraq, and ask what we'll trim to fight e-crime.
E-crime = E-crap another media driven dribbled label.
There are many students, even housewives who in their
spare time write botnets and other software mechanisms
simply for the purpose of learning how to program, in
C and C++ or even learn how to script in Perl, Python
and tcl. To make a blanket statement is to condemn
innocent people who have nothing to do with a limited
group of people that do warez aka pirate software on
irc servers when law enforcement, already has been
there to make cases and arrests and prosecutions.
Seeing that a dalnet luser is crying wolf, if my
history has taught me correctly, that network got
ddos'd out of existence over warez and battles over
control over software piracy. Other networks were
intelligent enough to get out of the way and make
sure such events do not destroy the client base.
-Nite