The U.S. Department of Justice is defending computer hacking laws that make it a crime to use a fake name on Facebook or lie about your weight in an online dating profile at a site like Match.com. But it's okay for the federal government to lie in response to a freedom of information request...
In a statement obtained by CNET that's scheduled to be delivered tomorrow, the Justice Department argues that it must be able to prosecute violations of Web sites' often-ignored, always-unintelligible "terms of service" policies.
The law must allow "prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider," Richard Downing, the Justice Department's deputy computer crime chief, will tell the U.S. Congress tomorrow.
Scaling back that law "would make it difficult or impossible to deter and address serious insider threats through prosecution," and jeopardize prosecutions involving identity theft, misuse of government databases, and privacy invasions, according to Downing.
The law in question, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, has been used by the Justice Department to prosecute a woman, Lori Drew, who used a fake MySpace account to verbally attack a 13-year old girl who then committed suicide. Because MySpace's terms of service prohibit impersonation, Drew was convicted of violating the CFAA. Her conviction was later thrown out.
What makes this possible is a section of the CFAA that was never intended to be used that way: a general-purpose prohibition on any computer-based act that "exceeds authorized access." To the Justice Department, this means that a Web site's terms of service define what's "authorized" or not, and ignoring them can turn you into a felon.
On the other hand, because millions of Americans likely violate terms of service agreements every day, you'd have a lot of company.
A letter (PDF) sent to the Senate in August by a left-right coalition including the ACLU, Americans for Tax Reform, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and FreedomWorks warns of precisely that. "If a person assumes a fictitious identity at a party, there is no federal crime," the letter says. "Yet if they assume that same identity on a social network that prohibits pseudonyms, there may again be a CFAA violation. This is a gross misuse of the law."
Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department computer crime prosecutor who's now a professor of law at George Washington University, says the government's arguments are weak.
Kerr, who is also testifying tomorrow before a House Judiciary subcommittee, told CNET today that:
The Justice Department claims to have an interest in enforcing Terms of Use and computer use policies under the CFAA, but its examples mostly consist of cases in which the conduct described has already been criminalized by statutes other than the CFAA. Further, my proposed statutory fix (see the second proposal in my testimony) would preserve the government's ability to prosecute the remaining cases DOJ mentions while not raising the civil liberties problems of the current statute.
Kerr's testimony gives other examples of terms of service violations that would become criminal. Google says you can't use its services if "you are not of legal age to form a binding contract," which implies that millions of teenagers would be unindicted criminals. Match.com, meanwhile, says you can't lie about your age, criminalizing the profile of anyone not a model of probity.
"I do not see any serious argument why such conduct should be criminal," Kerr says.
The Justice Department disagrees. In fact, as part of a broader push to rewrite cybersecurity laws, the White House has proposed (PDF) broadening, not limiting, CFAA's reach.
Stewart Baker, an attorney at Steptoe and Johnson who was previously a Homeland Security assistant secretary and general counsel at the National Security Agency, has suggested that the administration's proposals to expand CFAA are Draconian. Uploading copyrighted YouTube videos twice "becomes a pattern of racketeering," with even more severe criminal penalties, "at least if Justice gets its way," Baker wrote.
In a kind of pre-emptive attack against Kerr's proposed fixes, the Justice Department's Downing says the CFAA properly criminalizes "improper" online activities.
"Businesses should have confidence that they can allow customers to access certain information on the business's servers, such as information about their own orders and customer information, but that customers who intentionally exceed those limitations and obtain access to the business's proprietary information and the information of other customers can be prosecuted," Downing's prepared remarks say. Sooo... gun walking is OK. Lying online is not. Anyone feel like Big Brother is looking over your shoulder?
#1
The U.S. Department of Justice is defending computer hacking laws that make it a crime to use a fake name on Facebook or lie about your weight in an online dating profile at a site like Match.com
...didn't DoJ just float a action to allow them to lie to everyone? Oh, yeah. One set of rules for me, another set of rules for thee.
Now if they want to extend the crime of identity theft if someone cops another person's picture claiming it is them, they can just extend existing statutes rather than create new law.
#3
Yes, in fact I am watching every single one of you. I log every single one of your mouse clicks and key strokes. I know who you are and I know where you live. Get used to it.
Posted by: Eric Holder ||
11/16/2011 14:22 Comments ||
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#4
Seems to me charging the person in question wwith whatever law they charged Kavorkian for assisting suicides should cover it. It was what the person said, not that they lied to MySpace that matters.
President John F. Kennedys nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., netted a $1.4 billion bailout for his company, BrightSource, through a loan guarantee issued by a former employee-turned Department of Energy official.
Its just one more in a string of eye-opening revelations by investigative journalist and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer in his explosive new book, Throw Them All Out.
The details of how BrightSource managed to land its ten-figure taxpayer bailout have yet to emerge fully. However, one clue might be found in the person of Sanjay Wagle.
Wagle was one of the principals in Kennedys firm who raised money for Barack Obamas 2008 presidential campaign. When Obama won the White House, Wagle was installed at the Department of Energy (DOE), advising on energy grants.
From an objective vantage point, investing taxpayer monies in BrightSource was a risky proposition at the time. In 2010, BrightSource, whose largest shareholder is Kennedys VantagePoint Partners, was up to its eyes in $1.8 billion of debt obligations and had lost $71.6 million on its paltry $13.5 million of revenue.
Even before BrightSource rattled its tin cup in front of Obamas DOE, the company made it known publicly that its survival hinged on successfully completing the Ivanpah Solar Electrical System, which would become the largest solar plant in the world, on federal lands in California. So it isn't just the Pelosis who are in on this solar scam
Brightsource has had some success selling their products to large oil companies who use it to make steam for enhanced oil recovery.
The project that scored the $1.4 B loan (not grant) is a risky one. It scales up the existing plant design by more than an order of magnitude.
Also, the number of permanent jobs will be about 100 not the figure that Breitbart uses.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
11/16/2011 21:34 Comments ||
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#4
Nice to know (most already knew), that these F-Wads were burrowing in and getting themselves embedded for huge profit skimming. I've been seething for a decade; there's absolutely no end in sight to their perfidy.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
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The U.S. Department of Justice is defending computer hacking laws that make it a crime to use a fake name on Facebook or lie about your weight in an online dating profile at a site like Match.com.
