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Where is Milo Medin when we need him? how would he be helping?

He would have pulled the plug. The story is from the very early days of the internet, probably long before NANOG existed. Milo worked at NASA and found a cracker from Finland on one of NASAs machines. The link from Finland to the rest of the world went through Norway to NASA. (That's THE link, there was only one link connecting all of Scandinavia to the rest of the net.) So Milo called the guy in Finland and said "Please fix it". The reply was "We can't do anything. We respect civil liberties." Soon he got the message because he wasn't connected to the net any more. If anybody has a good URL for the story, please let me know. I found one reference in google-books that said 1988. -----

AFAIK there's no law covering the use of what party X considers their 32 bit numbers (assigned by party A) by party Y.

Do contracts cover that? I'd expect that the paperwork for peer-peer, customer-ISP and ISP-backbone links would include some nice broad legalese about not doing nasty things.

Besides, how would that work? Say ARIN assigns US company X (operating only in the US) a block, but German company Y (with no US operations) starts announcing the same block. How are US or German laws going to help, when the parties have no common jurisdiction?

The law could be written to apply to the company bringing the bogus announcements across the US border. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam.