Death Penalty for Hackers, Really ?

JOHN TIERNEY of New York Times writes Worse Than Death Published: July 12, 2005 and he says that a good punishment for a hacker woud be

Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life. I realize that this may not be enough. If you have any better ideas, send them along.

in contrast to Mr. Steven Landsburg's Death Wish for Hackers.

Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million
in social benefits. The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year.

Well the best thing hackers are doing is keeping many people employed in software security firms by exposing vulnerabilities of lousy Microsoft Systems. This in turn gaurantess more competition and better products. I am sure Professor Landsburg has not calculated that benefit into his system of equations because the benefit of having better and superior products would overrun the cost. In that situation even JOHN TIERNEY's suggested punishement would be higher. I think the suggestion mentioned in his article

Convicted hackers like Mr. Jaschan could be sentenced to a lifetime of removing worms and viruses, but the computer experts I consulted said there would be too big a risk that the hackers would enjoy the job. After all, Mr. Jaschan is now doing just that for a software security firm.

is much better. Give them something they start enjoying and become useful for society because they are definitely better than those programmers who left loopholes for them and did not notice their mistakes until these softworm lovers came into action.

Read more in Worse Than Death - New York Times:

Last year a German teenager named Sven Jaschan released the Sasser worm, one of the costliest acts of sabotage in the history of the Internet. It crippled computers around the world, closing businesses, halting trains and grounding airplanes. Which of these punishments does he deserve?

A) A 21-month suspended sentence and 30 hours of community service.
B) Two years in prison.
C) A five-year ban on using computers.
D) Death.
E) Something worse.
"If you answered A, you must be the German judge who gave him that sentence last week.

If you answered B or C, you're confusing him with other hackers who have been sent to prison and banned from using computers or the Internet. But those punishments don't seem to have deterred hackers like Mr. Jaschan from taking their place.
I'm tempted to say that the correct answer is D, and not just because of the man-years I've spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives. I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are." Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits. The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes - one in 500 hackers - would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.