Having been brought up with computers, understanding DoS attacks, packet-sniffing and phone phreaking, it seems so easy to commit a crime. Set prefs this way and you're scanning for a broken router. Do it that way and you're denying service, or performing a weak, though probably prosecutable, intrusion. Click on this link and you're downloading a promo mp3 through Morpheus. Click on that one and suddenly you're guilty of posessing child pronography, with the digital papertrail to prove it.

The accessability of these crimes makes them seem fictional. To the uninitiated it would seem impossible that it's so easy to make a misstep, driven by curiosity or a missed click, into a feloneous act. It makes it all the harder that you can't see the cliff you're walking alongside in the fog, and might not even know you've fallen off of it until people show up at your door with a warrant and a bin for your electronic equipment, freedom, and dignity.

That's not what scares me the most though. It's that while I feel so comfortable with computers, millions of people are brought up to feel just as comfortable with guns, and the thought of them walking through the fog, not feeling the edge dividing the cliff from the abyss is a frightening one indeed.