On 12/10/2010 11:06 AM, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
The USA Patriot act says: "activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state, that (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping, and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S."
At most, B ii applies, but if I'm not mistaken, A, B, and C must all occur by that statute (the giveaway is C, as it doesn't make sense as a single condition). The Patriot act seems to discount foreign terrorism (unsurprising), but even going by A and B, the DDOS would have to be dangerous to human life and be illegal by US/state law, in addition to intimidating (which purposefully being dangerous to human life definitely falls under intimidation). So attacking infrastructure (effecting traffic lights, power, air traffic control systems, etc) would fall under terrorism (regardless of attack mechanism). I don't think one could constitute the inability to sell a product or process a payment as life threatening. Those acts fall under other legal definitions. Jack