A Police Official Wants To Make Teenage Hackers Even More Annoying

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How to deal with teenage hackers? While most of us think a swift kicking is the answer, the justice system doesn’t generally sentence somebody to a beating, at least not officially, and that’s left it with a conundrum. One that Gavin Thomas, one of the higher-ups in the Police Superintendent’s Association of Britain, is trying to solve, although his proposed solution leaves quite a bit to be desired, since he wants to strap teenage hackers with WiFi jammers.

To be fair to Thomas, his heart’s in the right place: He’d rather boot hackers off the the internet than send them to prison. Thomas thinks, bluntly, sending people to jail won’t deter cybercrime at all:

We have got to stop using 19th century punishments to deal with 21st century crimes. It costs around £38,000 a year to keep someone in prison but if you look at the statistics around short term sentencing the recidivism rate is extraordinarily high. We can continue jailing criminals but it is not going to help the long term situation and I speak as someone who has spent a career putting people in prison.

The issue, of course, is that first of all, WiFi jamming won’t block any sort of wired connection. Or, for that matter, most smartphones using something other than WiFi, which almost all of them do. It would also make teenagers walking DDoS attacks, as a few kids in a Starbucks would effectively shut down the entire internet there. All right, so maybe booting that one guy who buys a coffee and then takes the best table for hours would be a social good, but there’s still a lot wrong here.

That said, Thomas has a point: Being a wang on the internet should be punished, but jail doesn’t work with people who don’t consider the consequences of their actions, i.e. teenagers. We need better, more effective methods of finding and d

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