I’ve been softening on the issue of capital punishment as of late, but that has done little to dampen my enthusiasm for a plan I came up with a short time ago to deal with spammers, phishers, 419 scammers, and the more malicious breed of hackers. To wit: I propose that a group of wealthy tech people get together to establish, and generously fund, a secret international hit squad tasked with taking down these bad actors, who threaten to make e-mail—and the Internet more broadly—all but unusable.

The proposition may seem somewhat drastic, but one must realize that an increasing proportion of the malefactors operate outside of the tidier and more law-abiding jurisdictions; to this Blog Goliard’s mind, that leaves extrajudicial assassination as the only real option.

And the faint of heart should be consoled by the knowledge that not all of them—not even near all of them—would have to be liquidated. Making an example of a relatively small number of egregious offenders should have a robust deterrent effect on the rest, since most of this behavior proliferates not because the benefits are all that great, but because the costs are nearly non-existent.

Introducing the risk of sudden, violent death would go very far in balancing out the equation.