Last month, Arizona congressman David Schweikert introduced the Scam Farms Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025 (H.R. 4988) to the House of Representatives. The bill would “authorize the President of the United States to issue letters of marque and reprisal with respect to acts of aggression against the United States by a member of a criminal enterprise or any conspirator associated with an enterprise involved in cybercrimes, and for other purposes.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]With this power, the president could empower private citizens or private companies to attack cyber scammers.The structure is similar to how pirates and privateers once attacked foreign enemies at sea on behalf of their government. In fact, the practice may have won the Revolutionary War for the United States. Estimates suggest that the 1776 Continental Navy had a mere 64 ships, compared to 1,697 licensed and bonded privateer vessels. Those 64 ships had 1,242 guns, compared to 14,872 privateer guns. As a result, the Continental Navy captured only 196 ships compared to the 2,283 ships captured by the privateers.Could this practice of privateering end the current cyber war? Should the United States consider mobilizing privateers in today’s cyber war? Couldn’t government resources do the job? The answer to questions such as these may be found in your own email inbox.First, consider how many scamming, phishing, or spoofing emails you receive each day. Forget headlines about ransomware paid, or about the billions of dollars lost every year to increasingly clever miscreants. How often have you been inconvenienced or downright victimized by cybercrime? Have you found success reporting such invasions to the FBI or other legal authorities? Probably not. Yet, if you tried to wreak your own revenge on the scammers, you’d be in violation of federal law.Back in 2010, I started promoting cyber privateering as I worked on a novel called Daddy’s Little Felons which drills into the concept. It’s taken about 15 years for the idea to gain traction. Earlier this year, my Utah senator Mike Lee proposed that Congress bring back letters of marque and reprisal. But it took until August 2025 for H.R. 4988 to be introduced.I remember a conversation I had with Oracle’s Larry Ellison sometime around 1986 during one of our weekly ad meetings. He said the government could put a million dollars and a year into training a pilot to fly a multi-million-dollar F-16, but one guy with a laptop, in a basement, with an ample supply of Jolt, could more swiftly attack America’s enemies—looting central banks and literally bringing down governments. In this context, F-16s can seem useless. Some jobs are meant for governments, and some are perfect for a new breed of privateering entrepreneurs. Imagine licensed and bonded cyber privateers looting offending criminal enterprises (including governments) and splitting the proceeds 50-50 with the U.S. Treasury. But of course, these privateers should have some guidelines. To establish these we can look back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which declared Europeans should stay out of the Americas, or else. Based on this principle, I would suggest adding something to Congressman Schweikert’s bill—a kind of Cyber Privateer Code along the following lines: Any unauthorized attempt to access your computer or phish your data access privileges constitutes a crime punishable by the looting of the attacker’s assets by an authorized cyber privateer.If it is determined that the attacker is acting under explicit instructions from a larger organization or government, the assets of that organization or government are also forfeit to the extent that an authorized cyber privateer may confiscate them. The individual whose assets were seized by a cyber privateer—or the publicly and legally designated spokesperson for the organization or government whose assets were seized by the cyber privateer—has the “right of parley” with the head of the cyber privateering organization. Such meeting could take place online in a two-way video conference, be publicly recorded by one or both parties, and could take place before the disposition of the booty but no later than 10 days from the confiscation.Innocent victims whose assets are directly and mistakenly confiscated by cyber privateers (and whose funds are not returned within 10-days after the parley) shall be compensated in an amount equal to four times their loss, with interest accruing on the restitution amount at the rate of 12% per annum.Notifications and requests for parley must be unambiguously left by the cyber privateer so as to allow the right of parley to be exercised in a timely fashion.To be sure, embracing this pirate-like model of cybercrime prevention would require new regulator structures and would invite new complications. What happens, for instance, when a licensed privateer with a valid letter of marque and reprisal absconds with several million dollars from a criminal organization? Will we find body parts from that privateer, along with those from friends and family members, strewn across various public places in a show of quintessential mobster bravado? However, I strong believe that this approach could unleash a powerful new tool for the U.S. to combat cybercrime. If it worked for us during the American Revolution, who is to say it couldn’t work for us today?