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I recently ran across a piece of Diggbait, written (predictably) by an Australian, lamenting the new German criminalization of possession and creation of hacking tools in much the same way gun possession is banned. The point of the article is to show why hacking tools aren’t like guns, and thus shouldn’t be banned.

This attitude is one I see alot in geeks, and one I don’t understand. How can you support government gun bans, redistributive taxes, and heavy government regulation/banning of things you don’t like, then turn around and complain about things like the DMCA and bans on crypto or hacking tools? Is the difference really just that you like crypto and hacking tools, and don’t like guns and huge corporations?

In case you’re curious, this is how guns bans and hacking tool bans are different:

1. You can’t know if a particular hacking tool will be used to commit a crime. Is that suspicious looking character with the copy of nmap just a harmless sysadmin probing his own network while looking shifty, or is it a nefarious cybervillain? Contrast this to guns, which are easy to separate into crime tools (’assault’ weapons, ’sniper’ rifles, ‘Saturday Night Specials’, ‘copkillers’, pump action shotguns, anything scary-looking) and sporting items (an old Daisy BB rifle and that piece of wood you whittled into the shape of a handgun).
2. A local (country-wide) ban on hacking tools will disarm the local security pros and white-hats, leaving them defenseless against the foreign foes and domestic law-breakers armed to the teeth with malware. Yet, gun bans apply to all people equally, and make sure that no one has guns, especially not the criminals, who despite their..err..criminal nature, wouldn’t dare violate a gun law.
3. Banning hacking tools without an exception for ’security professionals’, leaving them unable to do realistic pen testing or defense, actually reduces overall security, which is more or less the same point as made in (2). By contrast, gun laws don’t restrict police gun ownership, so the police can protect you.
4. If these tools are banned, security pros and whitehats will be unable to learn how to use them, or even how their potential use should influence the design of security systems. On the other hand, you can ban all guns and still allow the now-disarmed civilians to learn how to shoot by playing Counter-Strike, just in case.
5. A gun in the house is more likely to kill a family member than an intruder (yes, you and I both know this is a grossly misleading and flawed statistic, but work with me here), while you can’t accidentally synflood someone (ok, so you can if you fuck up the nmap command line, but whatever), or get drunk one night and fly into a booze-induced rage freakout and exploit a cross-site scripting vulnerability. Anyone who’s perpetrating a hack knows its illegal and is doing it intentionally and thus has demonstrated a willingness to break the law, so adding one more law to break won’t deter the attacker in the slightest. Thus, you should ban guns because who knows what some asshole will do with them, but hacking tools should be legal, with criminal penalties focused on crimes perpetrated with the tools.

I must assume the author of these five points, being an urbanized citizen of a country with a rather heavy-handed gun ban regime and a political climate favorable to strict gun controls, is not particularly familiar with the finer points of the gun rights argument, as he has unintentionally raised most of the popular gun rights defenses in his attack on the German hacking tools ban.

In my opinion, guns and hacking tools should be legal, for much the same reason that knives, bats, trans fats, junk food, alcohol, and recreational drugs should be legal: because they are inanimate objects correlated both (in some cases, presumably excluding junk food) with criminal activity (which is already, you know, a crime) and lawful exercises of individual liberty which no just government has any business regulating.

Molon Labe, my German hacker friends, Molon Labe.

Tags: guns, hacking tools, Migrated from Drupal, politics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Migrated from Drupal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.