Well said! The spam-filtering and antivirus industries have often struck me as enemies disguised as friends. They rely on spam and viruses to continue, so they can continue selling us their technological solutions to human problems.
And locksmiths don't want the burglary rate to drop ... it's bad for business ...
What bothered me about the Soloway case is the time scale. They let him keep spamming for something like 5 years while slowly gathering evidence. Computer criminals just don't think in a 5-year time scale. Things happen too fast. They're like shoplifters -- they need to face substantial consequences on the *day* of the crime, or there will be little or no deterrent effect, and massive needless damage done.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And, midst your examples above of people and industries who want to maintain the status quo for various reasons -- generally financial -- be sure to include the 'corrections industry' along with the locksmiths. Doesn't it almost make you go spastic with laughter when a police officer notes how 'all we are trying to do is reduce the crime rate; nothing would be better than for us (police officers) to be out of a job from lack of crime?' (or words to that effect; they are not too original in their thinking.) Once in our kindergarten class at school Officer Friendly came around to tell all us students about how 'police officers were our friends' and how they were trying to eliminate or do away with crime. I thought back then that sounded a bit odd, but it was not until fifth or sixth grade I began to grasp the irony of it all. So when Officer Friendly came around again to address us in seventh grade, I held up my hand when he asked if there were any questions or comments: I am sure he was expecting me to snitch on my parents or friends, claiming they were either (a) drug users, (b) drug pushers, (c) sex molestors or (d) other breeds of malevolent individuals; (no, I take that back, we did not have _open_ drug abuse nor sex offenders in those days, but he sure was looking for some type of malevolence to be certain so that he would make a big show of adding yet one more intake to his score of corrections industry inmates.) Drug use came along in the seventies and sex offenses came along in the 1990s.I held up my juvenile hand and asked him, "Officer Friendly, are you going to really stand there and tell us you'd like to see the ten thousand employees of the Cook County Jail and Sheriff's Department out of work? And you really want to see the several thousand police officers of the Chicago Police out of work? And what about the millions of dollars spent each year for the construction of new prisons? And what about the thousands of employees in the prison system?" Officer Friendly's face became sort of contorted with hate, but our teacher was unable to get me to shut up either. Finally, Officer Friendly looked at me and said, "you know something, kid, you really are a smart-aleck son of a bitch." And over the next half-century or so, we have witnessed an unbelievable growth in the corrections industry and its peripheral occupations, such as prison phone services, prison food service, private corporate prisons, etc. We had none of those 'periperies' back in the 1950-60's of course. To say nothing about MSNBC's thice weekly hour long program entitled 'LOCKUP' where we television viewers are given guided tours of the many correctional facilities in the USA.
Lots of people depend on the status quo to gve meaning to their own lives. PAT]