The Economics of Executing Virus Writers

applemasker writes "Slate.com has an article titled Feed The Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms which argues based on economic theory (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that it is a 'better investment' to execute the creators of worms, virus and trojan authors, than murderers. Anyone who has tried to resurrect a network or computer after a nasty infection may agree. Although the author does not seriously argue for capital punishment for the script kiddies, it does raise some interesting issues about how much 'value' society puts on certain types of harm and the author's view of a government's role in protecting us from it."

Bad

[ThisNukes4u]

Any execution of anyone is a bad idea, no matter how much they "deserve" it.

Humans keep living longer

[Anonymous Coward]

In the old days, you might die at 40 or 50, and now you can live on until you're 70 or 80. That means the old 30 year sentence for a 20 year old, which would've released him near the end of his life, isn't nearly as effective. He could get out of jail at 50 and commit a bunch more crime.

Re:Wow

[pclminion]

Tounge-in-cheek or not, this article is comparing a person's life to a dollar figure. Now, I'm as much a fan of cleaning out virii as anyone else, but that's just messed up. How much is a human life worth?

According to the U.S. government, anywhere between $1 million and $6.3 million [tufts.edu].

I seem to remember hearing that the U.S. military uses the value of $2 million per soldier. I can't verify that at the moment.

Re:While you're at it

[tsheriffk]

I have wasted the last two days fighting the nachi.b virus that has been running around in our network. I can tell you that the biggest problem we face is trying to convince the execs that it is in the best interest to lock down the computers more.. also, the fear of taking down users caused by conflicts with the ms patches and our application has been such a big fear that we have rolled the dice and prayed that tipping point catches and stops all these viruses..

In the spirit of Jonathan Swift

[fiannaFailMan]

Good to see that the style of Jonathan Swift's famous modest proposal [upenn.edu] for aleviating poverty in Ireland is still around. His idea was to treat impoverished Irish children as livestock to be fattened up for consumption. A tongue cannot become more firmly embedded in a cheek!

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

In America 1.7 million $ if you are a Caucasian heterosexual male.

900,000 if you are an African American heterosexual male.

2.8 million $ if you are a blond blue eyed heterosexual Caucasian female.

If you are a firefighter even less. If you cheat people out of money for a living multiply that number by 10-100. Reference World Trade Center charities for actual numbers.

Thats the way the cookie crumbles. Blame the Insurance companies and movies/tv that promote this bullshit.

Deterrence...a great point

[dtjohnson]

The author makes a great point on the value of a deterrent.

We focus all of our efforts on futilely trying to prevent easy-to-commit crimes, such as writing Windows virus scripts, when we should be concentrating more on deterrence. For example, stealing horses a hundred years ago was ridiculously easy. You just walked up to the hitchin rail, grabbed the reins, climbed aboard, and rode off over the horizon...no key required. It would have been impossible to 'prevent' the crime so the punishment focused on deterrence. Horse thieves were publicly derided and executed...sometimes without the benefit of a trial.

The modern day equivalent of a horse thief is a virus author...or a spammer.

The death penalty does not deter murder.

[curlyFry]

One of the major assumptions by the author of the article (and most people) is that the death penalty deters murder. It doesn't.

Check out The Death Penalty Inormation Center [deathpenaltyinfo.org] for more facts, info, and studies.

All of the authors economic number crunching is totally invalid because of this. :(
However that doesn't mean that I don't WANT to execute them. ;P

Re:Simple

[mAineAc]

Have you ever been to prison? I have been to jail a few times. Troubled youth, you know how it is. I never had anyproblems in jail. I am not saying that no one does, but from what I have seen for the most part they don't. Most people in jail just want to do their time and leave. And the more money you have the less likely you are going to a bad prison. You goto a minimum security prson where it is very easy. You watch cable all day get computer time and even can run your business sometimes. You watch to much tv. I am not saying bad things don't happen in jail, just depends on where you are and your situation.

Sorry you're wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just you.

Some penalties for some crimes have gone up over the last 15 years (and some have gone) but over the last, say, 100 years, the severity of punishments served out has gone down dramatically. Think of the hanging judges in the wild west, or the justice system of any European country 150 years ago.

A Modest Proposal

[rk]

Jeez, people, it's satire! This form of satire has been around for a long time [art-bin.com]. I love how someone can write a "punishments go up, never down" hyperbole and another can write "how can we compare human life to a dollar figure?" (Hint: It's done all the time [behan.ws]) and it gets modded insightful. I hope the original posters were extending the joke, but somehow, I get the sense that they were posting in earnest.

If you don't see the humor in this article, I beg of you to abstain from watching Farrelly Brothers and Austin Powers movies and recommend you pick up some books and read some Jonathan Swift or Oscar Wilde, to name a couple. There's more to humor than dick and fart jokes, and if you understand that, I'm sure you'll live longer.

Re:Punishments go up, never down

[stephenbooth]

Actuyally I don't. I do know, from talking to people I know who work in LA, a number of them in hospitals and medical centres, that pollution (and poverty) related illnesses are a serious problem. I cited the Michael Moore quote because others are likely to have heard of that, not everyone has the links to LA that I have.

Stephen

Re:Wow

[pyrotic]

There are human lives and there are human lives, whatever the constitution says. For example, in order to prevent another WTC style attack (3,000 odd dead, mostly Americans) the Bush administration deemed it worthwile to attack Iraq (10,000 dead at least, mostly Iraqis). Leaving aside the question of whether Iraq had anything to do with the WTC attack, that gives us a ratio of about 3 to 1. So, can we assume that one American is worth 3 Iraqis? According to CIA GDP figures, Iraqi average income is $2,400 a year, compared to $36,300 for the US. So in fact one American should really be worth 15 Iraqis, assuming a similar national wealth distribution curve.

Applying these calculations to other situations gets really interesting, but I'm not going to go into that here.

Re:Punishments go up, never down

[ragnar]

I can't recall the source, but I've read before that the fear of being caught is a larger deterrent than the penalty. When interviewing criminals they never reveal that the penalty was trivial or considered in a cost/benefit ratio, but rather they simply didn't expect to be caught. If we can trust these findings, it should lead us to increase the presence of police officers rather than increasing the penalties for crime. The added benefit would be less cost to incarcerate criminals for excessively long periods of time.

Don't get me started on mandatory minimum laws, which stipulate that congress knows better than judges what sort of sentence to issue.

Re:Punishments go up, never down

[Minupla]

Capital punishment was revoked in Canada in 1976, and has seen no resulting rise in murder rate (Murders in 2001 were 554, 167 fewer then in 1975, the year prior to the absolution capital punishment)

USA has much higher crime rate

[Cryogenes]

Here is a report of international crime statistics [homeoffice.gov.uk] which shows that there is, in fact, far more violent crime in the US than in Western Europe.

The following are average numbers of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants per year from 1997 to 1999

US : 6.26
England : 1.45
Germany : 1.28
France : 1.63
Norway : 0.85
Russia : 20.52
S.Africa: 56.49

Interestingly, the land of the free also has the extremely high prison population (from the same source, again per 100.000 inhabitants)

US : 682
England : 125
Germany : 97
France : 91
Norway : 56
Russia : 729
S.Africa: 327