Oh, if only fighting cyber crime were really as tough and sexy as portrayed by Bruce Willis' character in the film Live Fast and Die Hard. The truth is that bringing cybercriminals to justice is painstaking, and requires a lot of specialist skill. It doesn't help that most of our real world laws don't fit so well when we try to apply them in the virtual world. "The law moves very slowly, but the internet moves really, really fast," says Susan Brenner, Professor of Law and Technology at the University of Dayton Law School. Brenner's been researching the intersection of technology and law for years now. She and Leo Clarke of the Thomas M. Cooley School of Law have just written a paper outlining a new approach to tackling cyber crime. They contend that our normal reliance on local, state and even federal law enforcement officials to stop and deter real world crimes doesn't cut it online. It's time, they say, to perhaps explore an older enforcement and prevention model -- the sheriff's posse from days of yore. That means finding incentives to get more people to download, use and update their own anti-virus software.
I recently spoke with Brenner about the idea, and she began by using an example of how real world crime doesn't apply in the virtual world -- a bank robbery:
A Conversation with Susan Brenner
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