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Computer Security And The Law

Computer Security And The Law

Computer Security And The Law

I. Introduction

    You are a computer administrator for a large manufacturing company. In
the middle of a production run, all the mainframes on a crucial network grind to
a halt. Production is delayed costing your company millions of dollars. Upon
investigating, you find that a virus was released into the network through a
specific account. When you confront the owner of the account, he claims he
neither wrote nor released the virus, but he admits that he has distributed his
password to "friends" who need ready access to his data files. Is he liable for
the loss suffered by your company? In whole or in part? And if in part, for how
much? These and related questions are the subject of computer law. The answers
may very depending in which state the crime was committed and the judge who
presides at the trial. Computer security law is new field, and the legal
establishment has yet to reach broad agreement on may key issues.

    Advances in computer security law have been impeded by the reluctance on
the part of lawyers and judges to grapple with the technical side of computer
security issues[1]. This problem could be mitigated by involving technical
computer security professional in the development of computer security law and
public policy. This paper is meant to help bridge to gap between technical and
legal computer security communities.

II. THE TECHNOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

A. The Objectives of Computer Security

    The principal objective of computer security is to protect and assure
the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of automated information
systems and the data they contain. Each of these terms has a precise meaning
which is grounded in basic technical ideas about the flow of information in
automated information systems.

B. Basic Concepts

    There is a broad, top-level consensus regarding the meaning of most
technical computer security concepts. This is partly because of government
involvement in proposing, coordinating, and publishing the definitions of basic
terms[2]. The meanings of the terms used in government directives and
regulations are generally made to be consistent with past usage. This is not to
say that there is no disagreement over the definitions in the technical
community. Rather, the range of such disagreement is much narrower than in the
legal community. For example there is presently no legal consensus on exactly
what constitutes a computer[3].

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