"Physical Reality IV"

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

Bad Boys, Bad Boys
Whatcha gonna do? 
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? 
Bad Boys, Bad Boys

repeat endlessly.

We did 4) two weeks ago.  Here are some more points.

5)  The Bad Boys must know where you are.

The general problem that Bad Boys face when policing cyberspace (and indeed
the whole modern marketplace) is that it is a "target poor" environment.  As
we saw in the last piece, the basic tactical reality is the force ratio that
can be applied to a territory.  How many bodies can you deploy per unit of
land to control it.  Even before you consider the size of the enemy force,
you have to consider the size of the territory.  This same calculus applies
equally to civilian law enforcement.

Another basic tactical problem is what von Clausewitz in "On War" called the
"fog of war."  This is the very great problem of knowing exactly where your
opponent is and what he is doing.

Note how computers can expand the "space" to be controlled.  Even before the
Internet became big, the problem can be seen in this excerpt from Sterling's
"Hacker Crackdown" (http://www.usfca.edu/crackdown/crack_6.html)

"About twenty-five boards vanished into police custody in May 1990. As we
have seen, there are an estimated 30,000 boards in America today. If we
assume that one board in a hundred is up to no good with codes and cards
(which rather flatters the honesty of the board-using community), then that
would leave 2,975 outlaw boards untouched by Sundevil. Sundevil seized about
one tenth of one percent of all computer bulletin boards in America. Seen
objectively, this is something less than a comprehensive assault."

Today, 30,000 web sites are created each month or so.  Just logging them is
hard much less ruling them.

The fact is that cyberspace is so vast, that it is very hard to make much of
a dent in it.  Policing territory is hard enough when you can see most of
it.  Any city cop or soldier doing house-to-house fighting can tell you that
crowded cities are harder to police than open territory.  Cyberspace has the
topography of madness.  Much of it is invisible and it grows changes and
deforms with the speed of the thoughts of the millions of its "residents."
And it has a doubling rate much faster than the doubling rate of "policing
hours" available to the would-be authorities.

Aside from sheer size and crazy topography, cyberspace can be very hard to
penetrate.  We on this list are well aware of the tools of obfuscation:
cryptography, false identities, remailers, proxies, etc.  An even bigger
factor are the features of our world that we as sophisticated users don't
even think about.  The strange nature of the place is hard for outsiders to
grasp.  The "locals" always have the strategic advantage of familiarity with
a territory.  The speed of technological change is also problem as is the
speed of "movement" within the system.   
 
Even if the opposition had the troopies to patrol the vast new territories
there are these frustrating "magical" qualities of cyberspace.  You block
one WWW site and its content in "teleported" within minutes to another site
half a world away.  You require your local ISPs to interpose a "Surfwatch"
interface between your captive citizenry and the free world and some of
those captives don the "invisible cape" of a proxy server to get at the
content they want.  Then there's the "force field" of crypto to block your
investigations.  None of these "magical" technologies are perfect they can
be defeated (sometimes) but defeating them takes resources.  And so far, the
Bad Boys haven't been winning too many in cyberspace.  

<More Tomorrow> 

DCF