Back in the late 1980's Clifford Stoll was a computer systems admin at UC Berkeley. Small amounts of University CPU time were un accounted for. In running down the discrepancy Stoll discovered that he had a hacker logging into his Unix machine and fishing around for passwords and classified data. After a year or more or cat and mouse computer games, Stoll localized the hacker to an apartment in Hannover West Germany. He had the telephone number, the street address, the name of the hacker. West German police wanted to bust said hacker, but West German law was very protective about civil liberties. The West German cops said they needed a complaint from the Americans before they could arrest the hacker since breaking into American computers was not a crime in West Germany.
Stoll tried every thing he could over a course of months to get the FBI interested in the case. No luck. The Bureau was into its stupid phase.
Now, twenty years later, the Americans are going to do something about hackers. About time. According the the Wash Post, American intelligence agencies will be watching the net for hackers breaking into US government computers.
More effective would be to ban the use of Windows for all government work due to rediculous vulnerability.
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