Winn Writes & Wrants

France announced a big party. They called it Nuit Blanche.

My daughter and I are in Paris and she said she went to one when she lived here and it was one hell of a party.

“Let’s go!” It begins around dark with a half dozen key ‘party zones’.

We had dinner and bought a couple of bottles of wine (awesome red at $4) and off to the chaos. The streets were riotous in a good way. Gendarmes everywhere. Machine guns, too, in a good EU sort of way.

People carousing, drinking, open liquor everywhere… partay! But Ashley and I keep our wine in her “Hackers Are People Too” tote bag. The line to get into Luxembourg Gardens (a huge gorgeous public park) is eternal. Partay! Crazy music. Noise. Shouting. Honking. Traffic like… why the hell are you even driving?

I am thoroughly prepared for a French pat-down. Uzis around. So, yeah, I expect security. Aha! We’re at the gate. And what do the police want? OUR FRICKIN’ WINE!

No drinking in the public park… vin rouge is cascading down the streets… Uzis are everywhere… what are they trying to protect against?

Security Metaphor: Make noise in the East and take their wine in the West. (Sun Tzu) The massive presence of heavily armed police makes one feel reasonably protected (in a hit the ground quickly sort of way) and indeed, Nuit Blanche was 100% calm. There were no signs to indicate “intercict du vin” (no booze allowed) but that’s the beauty of Sun Tzu. An additional layer of unannounced security (that did p*** me off)  but completely understandable in retrospect. If an alcohol fueled riot had commenced inside Luxembourg Gardens, with only a handful of entrance/exits, the effects could have been most problematic. Nip it at the bud. Lessons to be learned.

Too many online scammers get away with what amounts to a wrist slap but a case if Las Vegas this week seems to be heading the right direction at least.

Internet scammer, Richard Neiswonger, sold “business opportunities” to unsuspecting victims through massive telemarketing efforts. Through extended court proceedings, the judge has had enough. His order: “Give us your $3.2 Million house…now… or go to jail.”

It’s about time.

But… let’s reconsider jail as the knee jerk reaction to cyber criminals.

“Send the punk to the slammer!” about a 15 year old kid who hacked the wrong company.

“She deserves 5 years in prison…” for being part of a bot net.

I have severe problems with the auto-American answer of jail for every miscreant act – especially of the cyber kind.

I firmly believe in alternative sentencing and think that the perpetrators should suffer in some way. But send them to the Group W bench with father rapers and murderers? I think not. The cost to society is like $50K+ per year to lock up the non-violent offender where he/she will fine-tune his criminal skills and contacts. Education courtesy of our Justice system.

We have the technology. Let’s use it.

GPS ankle-bracelets. Let’s use them.

Education: smart guys know their technology but got misdirected. Let’s put them back on track and utilize their expertise and truly behave like we believe in rehabilitation. How many cyber-acts are truly terrorist oriented? We fail to make much distinction from the ADD teen and Al Qaeda.

Can’t use a computer from home? Put the sensors in the ankle bracelet. If he/she really needs the Internet (who doesn’t?) let’s create a unique mandated path that all of their traffic must go through and monitor the hell out of it. How many thousands of cyber-criminals can be ‘controlled’ through one heavily restricted server farm? (Think China.)

The costs are a small percentage of what we experience now… and think of many more plea bargains will come about with reasonable sentences instead of the horrors of jail.

We have the technology. We know how to do it. But do we have the will? We can also send them back to jail if all else fails.