This was in last night's Overnight News Digest yesterday, recapping a story from NPR.org but a lot of people probably missed it:
Today, a subcommittee of the Committee On The Judiciary heard some fascinating testimony about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). (We know what that sounds like, but bear with us.)
The hearing, titled "Cyber Security: Protecting America's New Frontier," really focused on big cyber threats to the country's infrastructure, but there was another juicier question that came out of the hearing: The way the Justice Department wants to interpret a current law, lying on the Internet would amount to a crime.
. . .
In English? When you sign up for a Web service, a dating one or even to attain the ability to comment on NPR.org, you usually agree to a long terms of service that we bet most people don't even read. The way the DOJ wants the law interpreted means breaking any of those terms would constitute a crime.
Meet this issue that could destroy Democratic chances in 2012: imposition of a police state to make violation of a terms of service a federal crime. We have to give our leaders a sharp wake-up call, right now.
A story from Digital Trends is now making the rounds on Yahoo:
The US Department of Justice wants to make it a federal crime to violate the “terms of service” of any website, reports Declan McCullagh at CNet. According to this interpretation, breaching the terms of service of websites — which can be done by simply using a fake name on Facebook, lying about your weight on a dating site, or using Google if you’re under the age of 18 — could make you a criminal.
According to a leaked statement that Richard Downing, the DoJ’s deputy computer crime chief, will reportedly deliver to Congress on Wednesday, the DoJ will argue that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — an amendment to the Counterfeit Access Device and Abuse Act generally used to prosecute hacking and other serious cyber-crimes, and which went into effect way back in 1986 — must give prosecutors the ability to charge people “based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider.”
According to Downing, the expansion of this law is necessary for law enforcement to prosecute individuals for identity theft, privacy invasion or the misuse of government databases, among other infractions. Limiting “prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service… would make it difficult or impossible to deter and address serious insider threats through prosecution,” Downing is expected to say.
Just to reiterate, in case you didn’t catch that sly turn of legalese, the DoJ is saying that not allowing them to prosecute people for violating websites’ terms of service would make it “more difficult or impossible” to scare people with the threat of prosecution. Yay, America!
This, combined with the recent proposals by Pat Leahy and Amy Klobuchar to make heretofore innocent "fair use" of copyrighted material a federal crime leave me wondering whether the Democratic party has been infiltrated by Republican staffers or whether our party leaders are simply so out of touch that only a treatment of people showing up to their Washington and district offices every moment of every day may catch their attention.
I'll put it as simply as I can, exalted Democrats:
To the extent that the concern here (as argued) is "identity theft," there are plenty of laws that should be able to cover it -- such as ones involving "theft" and "fraud." For a 17-year-old to use Facebook (violating its Terms of Service) is between that person and Facebook. "Terms of Service" agreements are already a joke that few ever read, let alone understand; do we really want to put the weight of our party behind the idea that if you don't understand (and therefore fail to follow) an Internet ToS, or make what most would now consider an innocent misrepresentation in signing up for a service, you could be found to be breaking federal law? BREAKING FEDERAL LAW?
The seriousness of the term "federal crime" cannot be diluted into nothingness. That's the parody of our party, not the reality. Embrace that parody and turn the Republican Party, incredibly, into the friends of the common person. That's crazy!
And for this to be happening at the same time that the Occupy movement is dealing with issues of accountability -- that so many things that ought to be federal crimes, that really destroy lives, go unpunished -- simply worsens the problem.
I don't know who is coming up with these ideas, but I'm pretty sure that they must be in Washington bubble. If so, it is for the likes of us to come along with pins -- and pop, pop, pop. It's time for us to remind our exalted leaders that the Internet -- like the economy -- is not for someone else, but for us.
9:10 AM PT: I probably should not lump Leahy's and Klobuchar's bills together. Leahy's is unsalvageable madness. Klobuchar's, despite having earned the wrath of Justin Bieber, just needs to be rewritten.
1:39 PM PT: In a comment below, Old Left Good Left states that he thinks that this diary and the stories upon which it is based misrepresent the testimony (and therefore the intent of the proposed law.) He helpfully provided a link to the testimony, so that you can check for yourself. (Note: 9-page PDF.)
My opinion is that at a minimum insufficient attention is being paid to the breadth of the term "exceeding authorized access" (to a computer system.) Yes, this may be intended to apply to spying for the purpose of divulging information. But, as written, it would also apply to someone underage having an account on Facebook. In a country that devotes its resources to fighting marijuana and littering and camping on public property because it's easier (and safer) than fighting meth and pollution and pilfering pension funds, the government deserves no benefit of the doubt. If they want it to apply only to real bad violations of permitted access, they'd damn well better write it that way.
1:53 PM PT: DaveVentura, in this comment, points out that a reasonable fix to the problem has been proposed -- and rejected.