Wed. February 13, 2008: Phil Hallam-Baker on The dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime
The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its weekly lunch seminar:
CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 319
Topic: The dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime
Speaker: Phil Hallam-Baker, Principal Scientist, Verisign
Abstract:
As business has moved to the Internet, crime has followed. Today
the Internet ‘is where the money is’. Internet crime is professional
and organized according to the decentralized, market driven collective
models of Web 2.0. Many people have analyzed Internet crime, the
point is to stop it. But is this even possible?
Clearly we cannot eliminate the possibility of Internet crime any more
than we can eliminate crime in the offline world. But we can certainly
make the Internet a less crime-permissive environment and we can stop
many Internet crimes completely. There is a precedent for this, the
booming business in pirate satellite TV decoders that existed in the mid
1990s was shut down within a few years through a combination of
technical and law enforcement means.
The technical infrastructure has scaled much more gracefuly than the
social infrastructure. In particular the accountability mechanisms that
were present in the primordial Internet have snapped. To defeat Internet
crime we must establish reliably marked areas of the Internet where
businesses (and in some cases users) are subject to accountability.