This month's spam-bombing denial-of-service attacks against some of the Internet's most popular sites have triggered proposed legislation to tighten the penalties against computer hackers, give more authority to law enforcement in such cases, and create a new commission on security in cyberspace, among other proposals.
Texas Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison has proposed to double the prison time for hackers from five to ten years on a first offense, and twenty years for a second offense. She would also have hackers 15 and older face federal prosecution.
The Hutchison measure would also set up a National Commission on Cybersecurity, APBNews says, which would have to report to both Congress and the White House within six months.
"Current law treats computer hackers like harmless 'thrill seekers' when in reality they are reckless drivers on the information superhighway," Hutchison tells APBNews.
Vermont's Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy has proposed a bill to tighten up federal authority to probe global hacking incidents, broaden "loss" to account for the full costs to victims of hacking, and help law enforcement deal with "the challenge" of encryption technologies, APBNews continues.
"Technology has ushered in a new age filled with unlimited potential for commerce and communications," says Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "The Internet age has also ushered in new challenges for federal, state and local law enforcement officials. Congress and the administration need to work together to meet these new challenges while preserving the benefits of our new era."
These and other steps are aimed at blocking any potential repeat of the spam-bomb assaults which froze sites like Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, CNN.com, E*Trade, and others. The spam-bombings involved flooding the victim sites with bunches of random, meaningless information and jamming their systems, APBNews says.
Another Democrat, New York Senator Charles Schumer, says he'll put up a group of bills to offer nationwide "trap and trace" authority, shrink barriers to federal prosecution of computer crime, hike computer crime prosecutions via changing sentencing directives, and allow prosecuting juvenile computer criminals 15 and over as federal defendants at the U.S. Attorney General's discretion.
APBNews says the package would allow federal jurisdiction at the onset of an attack instead of waiting for damage assessments, with crimes doing more than $5,000 in damage treated as felonies and crimes below that mark as misdemeanors.
