The Right to Bear Denial-of-Service Attacks - Do We Need a Second Amendment in the Cyber World?

Slate ^ | Josephine Wolff

[nickcarraway]

Maybe the only thing Americans agree on anything when it comes to the Second Amendment is that the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” is all about guns and gun control. We’re very used to seeing that language invoked around incidents of gun violence. So it was striking to see the logic of the National Rifle Association applied to a completely different context in a piece about cybercrime in the New York Times on June 21, in which Jeffery Stutzman, the vice president of the cybersecurity intelligence sharing consortium Red Sky Alliance, is quoted as saying, “I do really believe there should be a Second Amendment right in cyber.”

But what are “cyber arms,” and what would it mean to have a right to bear them?

The tools that are wielded as “weapons” in this space are the same as the ones that we use on a daily basis—computers and software. We’re already all walking around with those in our pockets. The idea of a right to cyber arms has nothing to do with what you can carry or buy when it comes to computers or code. It has everything to do with how you use those tools and where you draw the line between offense and defense in the virtual world.

Sometimes that’s easy. Anti-virus software, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems, for instance, operate on a defender’s own network and do not venture beyond those confines to affect machines that belong to other people. These are clearly defense. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the U.S. Air Force last year explicitly designated six “cyber tools” as weapons.

[ConservingFreedom]

"The gray area comes in when nonmilitary actors, usually companies, feel that the only way to defend against a threat or attack is to strike back at the machines it originates from, either to mitigate the immediate harm by taking the offending machines offline or to retaliate and deter future attacks."

I can't get behind retaliation or deterrence - we have courts for that - but avoiding immediate harm seems like clear defense of one's property rights. It's like disabling the flamethrower of the guy trying to torch your house.

[nonsporting]

This is not an arms issue. That’s only raised to malign the NRA and the RKBA which deals with physical threats and deterrence.

This is virtual trespass and theft or destruction of property.

[tophat9000]

So Some old old school layer 1 hacking with a machete ?