Computer Crime.
Computer crime also continued to gain
attention, from the standpoint of both computer
sabotage and copyright infringement. The Computer
Security Institute, a San Francisco-based association of
information security professionals, said that U.S.
companies and other organizations it surveyed had
reported losing $100 million in the previous 12 months
owing to computer security breaches. The
institute said the problems included damage from computer
viruses, financial fraud, theft of proprietary
information, and sabotage. Dataquest, a market-research
firm, predicted that corporations around the world would
spend $6.3 billion on computer network security
in 1997.
In October the Presidential Commission on Critical
Infrastructure Protection said that U.S. telephone and
banking systems were vulnerable to computer
sabotage. The commission recommended that the government
increase its spending on computer security
research to $1 billion a year from $250 million. The
commission also touched on another hot computer
security issue--encryption, which involves coding
Internet or other computer messages so they
cannot be read by anyone who lacks a software ''key.''
The FBI had lobbied hard for a system under which the
police would have a software key to unlock all encrypted
communications in order to uncover criminal activity.
The commission's detailed findings were not made public,
but according to some news reports, the commission
endorsed some key access by government officials without
recommending widespread access to encrypted messages by
the police.
Computer crime also involved copyright
infringement. A study by accounting firm Price
Waterhouse showed that 28% of software sold in North
America was pirated, compared with 68% in Latin America,
80% in Eastern Europe, 43% in Western Europe, and 74% in
the Middle East. In March Los Angeles police said they
had raided one of the biggest software-counterfeiting
rings on the West Coast, recovering allegedly pirated
Microsoft software and cash valued at about $10 million.
Software, communications, and entertainment companies
lobbied heavily in Congress for copyright legislation
that would make it illegal to defeat electronic
anti-copying protection and could make Internet service
providers at least partly liable if people who infringed
on copyrights used their networks to do so. The
legislation was tied to the ratification of two new
international treaties dealing with copyrights. Some
library groups, Internet service providers, and
telephone companies said the protections sought in the
bill were too broad.
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