October 25, 2006 11:26AM # Does Online Vigilantism Make Sense? By [Jim Harper](https://www.cato.org/people/jim-harper) --- SHARE [Clyde Wayne Crews](http://www.cei.org/dyn/view_Expert.cfm?Expert=34) of the [Competitive Enterprise Institute](http://www.cei.org/) has a [new piece out](http://www.cei.org/pdf/5569.pdf) on cybersecurity, online vigilantism, and white hat hacking. It explores the many avenues for countering bad actors in the online environment, and draws a line between reaching out to aggress against them and using deception and guile to confound and frustrate them. The piece is apparently motivated by the the “[Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act](http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:h.r.5211:),” introduced a couple of years ago, which would have given the music industry immunity from liability for accessing peer-to-peer networks and attempting to prevent trade in their copyrighted material. Crews says “the industry is bound to try again.” His conclusion: “Explicit liability protection for particular classes of white hat hacking is ill advised.… A green light for hacking can work against broader cybersecurity and intellectual property goals, and there are alternatives.” ##### Related Tags [Technology and Privacy](https://www.cato.org/technology-privacy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).