I've had two random comments on my recent blogpost about Anakata and freedom on twitter that were so interesting I wish to recite them here, with longer commentary than 140 characters:
Henrik Kramshoej (professional security consultant with an understanding of business and economics with regards to securing enterprises) says the following:
"houses are not people, and they should not be protected by criminal law as if they were people." so what about burglary?
Computers are, in addition to not being people, also not houses. If an apartment in an apartment block is burgled, we do not protect the apartment block owner, we protect the apartment owner or the resident of the apartment. But actually, in the vast majority of cases we also don't do that because less than 5% of all burglaries are ever investigated by the police. This is why private security is very common in apartment blocks now. That is a major difference between IT crime law and house burglary law: in the former, we have a specific goal and ambition to protect whoever provided the flawed security system or whoever owns the computer ("the house") where different entities co-exist. In house burglary law, we have a clear focus on protecting the individual whose home was burgled.
The two legal regimes covering private real estate and computers are based on completely different problem formulations, and relatively similar solutions. The solution, as explained by Mr Kramshoej, is that
if NOT kept illegal to break into computers you will allow a lot to try it, which will require costly protections for all :( [...] just investigating a simple breakin is extremely costly and smaller companies and orgs will suffer greatly :-(