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Possibly paywalled: There's finally a Supreme Court battle coming over the nation's main hacking law (Alternative URL)
The Supreme Court is finally considering whether to rein in the nation's sweeping anti-hacking law, which cybersecurity pros say is decades out of date and ill-suited to the modern Internet.
The justices agreed to hear a case this fall that argues law enforcement and prosecutors have routinely applied the law too broadly and used it to criminalize not just hacking into websites but also far more innocuous behavior – such as lying about your name or location while signing up on a website or otherwise violating the site's terms of service.
If the court agrees to narrow how prosecutors can use the law, it would be a huge victory for security researchers.They routinely skirt websites' strict terms of service when they investigate them for bugs that cybercriminals could exploit.
It would also make the Internet far safer, they say. That's because current interpretations of the 1986 law, known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse act (CFAA), have made researchers wary of revealing bugs they find because they fear getting in trouble with police or with companies, which can also sue under the law in civil courts.
"Computer researchers are constantly afraid that a security test they run is going to run them afoul of the law," Tor Ekeland, an attorney who specializes in defending people accused of violating the CFAA, told me. "This law makes the Internet less safe because it chills legitimate information security research and it's bad for the economy because it chills innovation."
The fight centers on whether the law should apply just to hacking or more broadly to breaking rules on a computer.
How many Soylentils read the entire terms of service of all the web sites they visit? In some cases, people have been convicted of crimes for violating them. It would be best to read the entire article before commenting as there are several nuances and historical precedents that it addresses.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday May 01 2020, @06:35PM
"Placate" is probably the wrong word. "Preempt" would be a better fit. Because yeah, the private sector didn't think they needed it. Even though Bell had been getting phreaked for years, they still thought they could get away with security-by-obscurity forever.
In a more perfect world, the US government would have predicted the influence that networked computing would have and launch a program to provide free military-grade security consulting to US tech companies.
There's no way that ever could have happened, though. It would have required government to simultaneously be pro-private-sector and pro-big-government, not to mention incredibly prophetic.
It's the kind of thing that could only happen in a centrally-managed economy. Most of those were too anti-private-sector to ever consider such a scheme. All but one.
Which raises the question: is it possible that China is running such a program? They fit all the requirements. The CCP might be too paranoid, though. But if we start to discover that Chinese tech is much more secure than anyone else's, maybe this is the reason why.
Funny how cyberpunk in the 80s predicted the wrong east Asian country would come to dominate the world through superior technology.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?