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.

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In other news...

[Xichekolas]

... the UK outlaws hammers (citing their use to commit vandalism and murder), pliers (citing their use for sabotage and torture via fingernail removal), and cell phones (citing their use to coordinate groups of people without government knowledge and approval). From now on, all houses will be built by government agents, all wiring will be done by government spooks, and all interpersonal communication will happen by calling the new Worldwide Home Office Relay Exchange (WHORE) and giving a government agent the name of the person you wish to talk to and the message to relay that person. The government agent will then check the recipient, and either send agents to detain you on terrorism charges or deliver your message with a smile...

... U.S. said to be considering similiar, if not more draconian, measures...