UK Law May Criminalize IT Pros

An anonymous reader writes "More worrying news from the UK. This time, a bill meant to fight cybercrime may make it illegal to use or make available network security tools available, just because they could be used by hackers." From the article: "Clayton cited the Perl scripting language, created by Larry Wall in 1987, as an example of a useful technology that could fall foul of the law. 'Perl is almost universally used on a daily basis to permit the Internet to function,' said Clayton. 'I doubt if there is a sysadmin on the planet who hasn't written a Perl program at some time or another. Equally, almost every hacker who commits an offense under section 1 or section 3 of the CMA will use Perl as part of their toolkit. Unless Larry is especially stupid, and there is very little evidence for that, he will form the opinion that hackers are likely to use his Perl system. Locking Larry up is surely not desirable.'" A note that this is equally confusing but separate from yesterday's story about the UK government wanting private encryption keys.

Comments

Re:Bans Nmap Too

[Handpaper]

It's not just a proposal. It's more than halfway into law:

It was passed by the House of Commons earlier this month, and will be considered by the House Of Lords over the next couple of months

Once again we must rely on the Lords to stop the knee-jerk stupidity of the Commons foisting more draconian laws upon us. Let's hope they continue to do their job.

Re:it's the nature of these tools

[malsdavis]

This story is ridiculous! It is implying something totally different from what the law actually states in order to attract horrified readers. I bet the website is getting massive amounts of hits at the moment, but lets look at what the bill actually says:

"A person is guilty of an offence if he makes, adapts, supplies or offers to supply any article --
(a) intending it to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3 [of the Computer Misuse Act]; or
(b) believing that it is likely to be so used."

This is a common-sense sense law which recognises software for what it is: a tool. It looks almost identical to the law which applies to other tools capable of being used to commit offences, i.e. knifes, hammers, axes, pieces of wood etc.. You don't see the police arresting people who use these, unless they use them to commit (or attempt to commit) a crime, so why would they suddenly arrest anyone who writes a pearl script?

I think it is good to see a government finally recognising software like the useful tool it is, but one which (like most tools) can be intentially misused to cause harm.