Solving Cyber Risk by Andrew Coburn & Éireann Leverett & Gordon Woo

Author:Andrew Coburn & Éireann Leverett & Gordon Woo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119490920
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

7.2.2 The Origins of US Legislation

The legend of the computer whiz kid is part of hacking folklore, and has also had an influence on the development of US legislation on cyber crime. In the 1983 Hollywood movie War Games, a teenage computer-games enthusiast, who does not believe any system is totally secure, breaks into a US military supercomputer programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war, and almost starts a world war. For a kid, this was just playing around; for policy makers on Capitol Hill, this was a crime. This near-disaster scenario was cited the following year in a House Committee Report to a comprehensive crime bill, which ensured that computer crimes did not go unpunished. Emerging from this bill was the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits unauthorized computer access, interference, and obtaining data. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 extended government restrictions on wiretaps from telephone calls to include transmissions of electronic data by computer.

The passage of these two bills in the same year reflects the fundamental duality of cyber risk. Hacking skills can be used for offense as well as defense. A teenager can hack into the Pentagon computer system. Later on, as a mature adult, he could work for the National Security Agency (NSA), hacking on behalf of the US government. Indeed, the opportunity for authorized hacking is one of the attractions in working for the NSA. With all types of espionage, real world and cyber, what is authorized in the tradecraft of spying may not necessarily be fully compliant with US law, let alone the law of the country being spied upon. This explains why espionage is invariably denied, or not commented upon if the evidence is overwhelming.

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