http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/19/schneier_talks_law/
By John Oates in Vienna
19th October 2005
RSA Europe 2005 ISPs must be made liable for viruses and other bad
network traffic, Bruce Schneier, security guru and founder and CTO of
Counterpane Internet Security, told The Register yesterday.
He said: "It's about externalities - like a chemical company polluting
a river - they don't live downstream and they don't care what happens.
You need regulation to make it bad business for them not to care. You
need to raise the cost of doing it wrong." Schneier said there was a
parallel with the success of the environmental movement - protests and
court cases made it too expensive to keep polluting and made it better
business to be greener.
Schneier said ISPs should offer consumers "clean pipe" services:
"Corporate ISPs do it, why don't they offer it to my Mum? We'd all be
safer and it's in our interests to pay.
"This will happen, there's no other possibility."
He said there was no reason why legislators do such a bad job of
drafting technology laws. Schneier said short-sighted lobbyists were
partly to blame. He said much cyber crime legislation was unnecessary
because it should be covered by existing laws - "theft is theft and
trespass is still trespass".
But Schneier conceded that getting international agreements in place
would be very difficult and that we remain at risk from the country
with the weakest laws - in the same way we remain at risk from the
least well-protected computer on the network. ®
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