Sweden to Make Denial of Service Attacks Illegal

paulraps writes "Sweden is to pass legislation making Denial of Service attacks illegal. The offense will carry a maximum jail term of two years, and is thought to be a direct response to the attack which crashed the Swedish police's web site last summer. Nobody was charged for that, but the fact that it came shortly after a raid on the Pirate Bay's servers was thought by many to be not entirely coincidental. Sweden's move follows the UK, which is even tougher on web attackers — there the sentence can be over five years in prison."

Re:Mostly pointless...

[Xemu]

As most of the time DOS attacks are performed from outside the country, and therefor outside its juridiction, I doubt they'll even invoke it in court.

This law will allow the police to obtain the identity of the person using the IP address that is used for the DOS attack, even if this DOS attack is directed from Sweden to the outside world. I am sure there is a large amount of political pressure from the US in this matter and Swedish politicians are easy to intimidate.

It is important to note that the sentence term of 2 years was not chosen at random. When a crime carries this sentence as a possiblity, the Swedish police gets greater powers to use surveillance, wiretapping and raids to secure evidence such as the identity of person using a specific IP address.

In fact, this is also why thePiratebay.org exists and is so successful - since file sharing carries a sentence which is usually much less than 2 years, the police are not allowed to raid or subpoena the ISPs for the identity of the person that is using a specific IP address. (The Swedish MPAA aka APB have treid hard to get a criminal conviction for file sharing for this reason.)

So...

[TCM]

...does that mean it wasn't illegal up until now? That's actually more surprising to me.

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do just about anything on the Internet and are safe from prosecution. Why? Because the Internet crosses international borders and we all know that international law enforcement is just about impossible. No two countries have the same laws, the same penalties or even agree that the same things are criminal acts.

You raise an interesting point which I never considered. What happens when two countries *do* both have laws concerning the situation. If I crash a Swedish police website from here in Florida, who can prosecute me? Would I have to be extradited to Sweeden (not going to happen), or could I face a trial here in Florida? Federal court or state court? Whose laws would come into play?

seems reasonable

[DM9290]

This seems like a very reasonable maximum sentence. I am sure I can get 2 years for interferring with someones lawnmower or hairdrier in most jurisdictions. So I'm not sure this is even newsworthy. In fact.. I'm quite suprised this isn't already included in some kind of mischeif law thats already on the books and has been on the books for the past 500 years.

Its basically always been illegal to screw around with someone elses machinery.

Punishment...

[xaoslaad]

People who get charged with DUI's and other more grievous crimes don't even necessarilly end up in prison for the first offense. Sending people to prison for over 5 years for taking down a website is absurd. It's something that should probably be dealt with via stiff fines. In most cases it's just a frikkan' website. In most cases no ones life or well-being rely on it... perhaps a separate more severe punishment like prison time could be reserved for those public service type sites that might exist with a greater purpose...

At least the 'maximum punishment' of 2 years they are seeking does not seem too severe. If that maximum sentence isn't abused, and used only for those repeat offenders who just don't learn it seems alright...

Digg and Slashdot users are not mutually exclusive

[ickeicke]

Probably the news was on Digg earlier, resulting in a massive influx of visitors. You say that Slashdot was responsible for less visitors, but maybe that was because some Slashdot readers had already seen the story (hours) earlier via Digg?

It would be interesting to see how many people regularly visit both sites. I think that people who often check Digg, will RTFA even less often than regular /. users, because Digg often has stories faster (or so I am told, I myself only visit Slashdot).