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The Dartmouth
July 7, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Computer networks changed the game

The times when we could afford to have the Internet be an unfettered playground for the digerati have long come to an end. Today, too many systems, including banking, water, governmental services and military information, hinge on the proper, secure functioning of our information infrastructure.

These communication systems are vulnerable to criminal attacks. Currently, law enforcement is fighting a losing battle against such attacks because the law lags behind the technological development. The ramifications of a massive, worldwide communication network, accessible by all, unsecured, automated, anonymous and accountable to no-one have not yet been appreciated.

I would like to explain the magnitude of the reality shift we are witnessing now.

Misleading Mindset

There is a materialist assumption that underlies our society (and by extension our legal system). Material entities such as humans, corporations, and the government act and something tangible in the world is added, removed or changed. The physical world changes the physical world.

This assumption no longer necessarily holds true in cyberspace. Actions can be performed by virtual entities on virtual assets. Criminal A in country C stealing credit card info from company B in country D has not changed the material world in a traditional sense. A non-physical manifestation is acting on the non-physical world.

We, as a society, have not yet made this psychological transition from a fundamentally materialist conception of the world to a metaphysical one.

In this conception, the non-physical is not viewed as a mere appendage to the physical world. Rather, the physical and the non-physical will form an inextricable whole. Users will have to realize that what they do in cyberspace is no more or less 'real' than what they do in the physical world.

Destroying somebody's non-physical identity using electronic ID theft or posting false information about companies is no less pernicious just because one entry in a database is deleted or electronic fora are affected.

The monetary damages can be substantial, The FBI and the Department of Justice announced on May 23, 2001 a nationwide investigation into Internet fraud, code named "Operation Cyber Loss."

The Internet fraud schemes exposed as part of this investigation represent over 56,000 victims nationwide who suffered cumulative losses in excess of $117 million.

Computer Crime

Less pronounced, but still implicit, are the anthropocentric constants that pervade reality as we evaluate it. Our notion of reality (and the concomitant legal systems) are intimately linked to and predicated on human constants such as human reach, speed, reaction, lifetime and memory.

For instance, if a person has been reliably spotted at location A at time 12:00 and a physical crime was committed at location B one hundred miles away at 12:05, this would rule out that that person could have possibly committed the crime. He could not have committed that crime because the physical world sets rather strict boundaries. Moving non-negligible mass from point A to point B is no trivial task.

Cyberspace is different because the constitutive elements of the system (the networked clusters and the software that enable them) are qualitatively different from the physical world.

Designed consciously by humans, predicated on binary logic, they are deterministic, their state transitions require practically no physical changes and they operate (computations, communications) on a time scale that is several orders of magnitude smaller than any other 'natural' system we are accustomed to.

Why is this important?

First, in the natural world, there is enough random fluctuation of the constitutive elements (people, organisms, geography and the environment) to dampen the effects of most failures and hence prevent domino effects.

For instance, the influenza outbreak after WWI, which is often forgotten but the most devastating pandemic in human history did not wipe out humanity. Instead, the airborne, highly infectious disease retreated after ravaging most of the globe. Why? It turns out that natural systems have non-deterministic properties and mechanisms (variations in individuals, natural population movement, etc.) which prevent most catastrophic failures from cascading.

In cyberspace, there is no non-deterministic property that would inherently prevent this scenario. The recent 'Code Red' worm managed to infect over 350,000 Microsoft IIS servers in a 24 hour period. It spread so quickly and so effortlessly because there are no random fluctuations in software that can serve as dampening devices -- digital copies are identical -- and the domino effect is inevitable.

Secondly, the state data of networked computer clusters are represented by quasi-massless electric charges. Furthermore, changes in the states only involve toggling these electric charges.

This has two distinct effects. First, the speed at which signals can be propagated (and hence processes run) is almost seven orders of magnitude (10,000,000 times) faster than anything in the natural world. Processes can be started and finished in a blink of an eye, much quicker than human perception is able to follow. 'Internet time' is not just another buzzword.

Second, the electrons traveling down the wire are sufficient to change and transmit state data. In other words, the mediation requires no human intervention anymore. For all intents and purposes, the electrons are the human agent -- the sufficient electronic embodiment, every bit as effective and controlling as the agent's incarnated form.

Making Changes

How do we as a society in general, and law enforcement in particular, deal with this new reality? The era of default anonymity (packets, user, networks) must come to an end. The new operating principle has to be default identification. And the means to bring about these changes is through legal regulations.

One modest measure is to mandate by law an electronic paper trail. If you are sending data from A to B, so-called routers will handle the data along the way, ensuring that the data eventually reaches its destination. Router logs have to be kept for at least a couple of months.

Private organizations will have to be held accountable for knowing who sends what data through their network and for releasing this information to the properly authorized state or federal officials. Record keeping is not currently required, as incredible as this sounds.

We have recognized the benefit of regulations for the common good in other vital areas. For example, the Security Act of 1933 and the Security and Exchange Act of 1934 have led to the establishment of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principle (GAAP) for financial accounting, which has proven indispensable in a free-market economy for transparency reasons.

We have to come to a similar realization with respect to information flow. We should start laying the legal groundwork now.

The author is a PhD student at the Thayer School of Engineering and project engineer at Dartmouth's Institute for Security Technology Studies . The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Justice.