A while ago I published a post, “A hack is forever,” explaining that a competent hack is extremely difficult to eradicate from a cyber system – there is no certainty that the system is really clean. However, there is flip-side aspect of this in cyberspace that is not commonly understood: by way of dubious consolation, the hacker cannot be certain that he really got away with the crime.
Cyberspace is an information and communications space. In essence, we don’t really care what media our information is stored on, we care about the utility aspects, such as the efficiency of the storage, how quickly and conveniently information can be retrieved, and so on. Similarly, we don’t really care what communications channels we use, we care about our communications’ speed, reliability, security, etc.
Cyberspace has one very significant property: information cannot be destroyed. Just think about it. We can destroy only a copy of the information, i.e. we can destroy a physical carrier of the information, such as a floppy, a thumb drive, a letter, or a hard drive (often that’s not an easy task either). However, we cannot destroy the information itself. It can exist in an unknown number of copies, and we never really know how many copies of a particular piece of information exist. This is particularly true given the increasing complexity of our cyber systems — we never really know how many copies of that information were made during its processing, storage, and communication, not to mention a very possible intercept of the information by whoever, given our insecure Internet. Such an intercept can open an entirely separate and potentially huge area in cyberspace for numerous further copies of the information.
Back to the consolation point: cyber criminals of all sorts can never be sure that there is not a copy somewhere of whatever they have done. That copy can surface, someday, usually at the most inopportune time for the perpetrator.
One practical aspect of this is that Congress perhaps should consider increasing the statutes of limitations for cyber crimes, or crimes committed via cyberspace.