huridocs-tech United States government wants less web anonymity

  From Wired News, available online at:
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,34659,00.html

U.S. Wants Less Web Anonymity
by Declan McCullagh

3:00 a.m. 1.Mar.2000 PST
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government may need sweeping new powers to
investigate and prosecute future denial-of-service attacks, top law
enforcement officials said Tuesday.

Anonymous remailers and free trial accounts allow hackers and online
pornographers to cloak their identity, deputy attorney general Eric
Holder told a joint congressional panel.

Everybody's got issues in Politics

"A criminal using tools and other information easily available over
the Internet can operate in almost perfect anonymity," Holder told the
panel.

Holder said the Clinton administration is reviewing "whether we have
adequate legal tools to locate, identify, and prosecute cyber
criminals," but stopped short of endorsing a specific proposal.

Currently no laws require U.S. Internet users to reveal their identity
before signing up for an account, and both fee-based and free services
offer anonymous mail, Web browsing, and dialup connections.

During the unusual joint session, legislators from both the House and
Senate judiciary committees gathered on Capitol Hill where they
discussed how assaults on Web sites could cripple the U.S. economy.

They also wondered when the yet-to-be-identified perpetrators of the
recent spate of DoS attacks would be identified.

If the noncommittal testimony of Justice Department and FBI officials
is any indication, it might take a while. "Computer crime
investigators in a number of FBI field offices and investigators from
other agencies are investigating these attacks," said Holder, who
refused to divulge details.

The technical details of the presentations seemed to elude Republican
South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, the oldest surviving member of
the Senate. Thurmond, chairman of the Senate's criminal justice
oversight subcommittee, was born in 1902 and ran for president in 1948
as a member of the States' Rights party.

But it was one of the younger members of the House -- Texas Democrat
Sheila Jackson Lee -- who appeared the most confused. She said that
parents should be held legally responsible for what their teen-age
children do "on those Internet channels."
Most of the legislators at the hearing seemed content not drafting new
Internet regulations, a laissez-faire concept enthusiastically backed
by the tech firms that testified.

Howard Schmidt, Microsoft's chief information security officer, said
he would "caution against swift action, legislative or otherwise, on
this front."

"Microsoft and other information technology companies deal daily with
a host of hacker assaults," he said. "We regularly defeat the vast
majority of those efforts and we constantly upgrade our products and
support services to provide protection against similar attacks."

A Cisco Systems executive agreed.

"We do not ask Congress for new laws in the area of Internet
security," said Charles Giancarlo, a Cisco senior vice president.
"Cooperation, not regulation or legislation, will ensure that the
Internet remains secure."

That hasn't stopped legislators from legislating. Democratic New York
Senator Chuck Schumer said last week that he wants to make it easier
for police to eavesdrop on an online communication and prosecute
15-year-olds as adults.

Schumer's proposal also would allow federal prosecutions under the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act even if the company being attacked
suffered no monetary loss. Current law requires $5,000 in damages
before a prosecution can happen.

While the industry doesn't seem wild about the plan, they don't appear
to be eager to oppose it either.

But a representative of a civil liberties group voiced concerns about
federal legislation that would hand prosecutors more power.

"You must be careful to ensure that the recent Internet attacks do not
serve as justification for legislation or other government mandates
that will be harmful to civil liberties and the positive aspects of
the openness and relative anonymity of the Internet," said James
Dempsey, staff counsel of the Center for Democracy and Technology.


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