[LINK] Bruce Schneier: Privacy eroded in virtual world

[Eric Scheid]

On 27/2/05 2:03 PM, "Deus Ex Machina" <vicc at cia.com.au> wrote:

> privacy breaches and theft are two separate issues. criminals  where
> pilfering credit card details long before it became an issue on the net.

Referring back to Schneier's article, the point he was making was that the
legal protections in the offline world are often just simply not there in
the online world.

> you want to make a point about crime online then you have a point. crime
> online is becoming prolific. try and link that to privacy then you have
> the wrong suspect. you are wasting your time. you are not going to stop
> crime online by strengthening privacy. you are flogging the wrong horse.

Are you saying there are no privacy related crimes?

There are lots of different types of crime. Schneier's article addresses the
privacy related set of crimes, and how the laws in that particular arena are
much weaker online than offline due to circumstances of the environment.

Laws also don't spontaneously appear all by themselves. They come into being
because people realise the need for such laws. Schneier is pointing out that
in the online world we might think we are protected by the laws we already
know about, but are in fact not so protected. Raising awareness of this
shortcoming is a natural part of the lifecycle of legislation (and much
preferred to the knee-jerk reactionary/populism method of writing laws).

e.