Sending armed cops to arrest a hacker is like shooting gnats with a bazooka
When police in New Zealand arrested suspected online pirate Kim Dotcom, they were accompanied by a dog unit and a SWAT team armed with automatic weapons.
Could there be a better visual representation of the gulf between the people attempting to police the internet and those suspected of corrupting it? The man is even named after the internet, for God’s sake (to Mr and Mrs Dotcom, a child. “We shall call him Kim. I wonder what he’ll be when he grows up?”). Turning up with the cavalry worked when the master criminals were drug lords and Mobsters. But Dotcom is a 20-stone computer hacker – police could probably have lured him into a cell with a bucket of ice cream and a copy of Razzle.
There is an air of pointlessness to the whole episode. Trying to out-muscle hackers is like trying to kill a swarm of gnats with a bazooka. There are too many of them; they move too fast. Sure, you might get the odd one, but it’s going to be a very expensive process and by the time you get there, there are going to be another hundred buzzing around your head. This is a world where Anonymous can intercept calls between the FBI and Scotland Yard. Toddlers with a Fisher Price “My First Smartphone” can outwit our finest security experts. That isn’t to say we should just turn the mad house over to the patients – after all, revenues from online crime are up there with those from drug trafficking. But the emphasis has got to be on making online structures safer and more efficient. Consumers have to be tempted away from piracy with better services.
Not that I’m defending Dotcom – he’s no angel. He has convictions for insider trading, embezzlement and handling stolen goods. He owns multiple passports and has a habit of fleeing to avoid criminal charges (a New Zealand court decided, on these grounds, to deny him bail, which seems reasonable until you think about it for a zillionth of a second and remember that this is a six foot six German called Dotcom whose face is all over the news, who is stuck on an island – where did they expect him to go?). When police caught up with him, he was barricaded in a safe room and had to be physically cut out before he could be arrested. The registration plate on his Mercedes (one of 18 luxury motors in his fleet) reads “GUILTY”. He’s playing the starring role in a badly written sci-fi movie.
From a legal point of view, things don’t look good for him – a week ago Sweden’s Supreme Court rejected an appeal from the founders of The Pirate Bay, meaning Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström are going to jail. Personally, I don’t really care what happens to Dotcom as long as they string out the trial for as long as possible. It’s far more fun than Eastenders.