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April 25, 2020 10:34 pm

Supreme Court To Consider Limiting America's 'Anti-Hacking' Law

America's 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finally considering whether to rein in the nation's sweeping anti-hacking law, which cybersecurity pros say is decades out of date and ill-suited to the modern Internet," according to the Washington Post's cybersecurity writer:The justices agreed to hear a case this fall that argues law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... [C]urrent 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...." "This is about whether a statute should be drafted so broadly that everyone is committing crimes all the time and the government gets to choose who to prosecute," Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me... The Justice Department even charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the law — his crime was allegedly giving advice to one of the site's main leakers Chelsea Manning about how to crack a Defense Department password to gather more information... One of the best-known CFAA prosecutions was of the Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

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