New CFAA Could Subject Teens To Jail For Reading Online News

redletterdave writes "Anyone under 18 found reading the news online could hypothetically face jail time according to the latest draft of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is said to be 'rushed' to Congress during its 'cyber week' in the middle of April. According to the new proposal floated by the House Judiciary Committee, the CFAA would be amended to treat any violation of a website's Terms of Service – or an employer's Terms of Use policy – as a criminal act. Applied to the world of online publications, this could be a dangerous notion: For example, many news websites' Terms of Use warn against any users under a certain age to use their site. In fact, NPR and the Hearst Corporation's entire family of publications, which includes Popular Mechanics, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle, all disallow readers under 18 from using their 'services.' According to the DOJ, this would mean anyone under 18 found accessing these sites — even just to read or comment on a story — could face criminal charges."

Comments

What's the First Amendment?

[Jetra]

Want to keep the public in the dark and ill-informed? This is the perfect way!

Re:What's the First Amendment?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Everything that you do, every day is against the law. All the time.

All it needs is a motivated prosecutor or enforcement agent, to activate your infraction.

More importantly, law writing

[spongebue]

I think that even more importantly, this effectively gives website owners the power to write laws on their own. Want to include a stipulation in your terms of use that forbids shopping at the competition after merely setting foot in your website? Sure, why not? And if you have the de facto enforcement of criminal law on your side, even better

Re:Alarmist much?

[gstoddart]

The odds are much better than this is actually how the law is being written, and they are "expecting the court to correctly interpret it" because, you know, that' the job of the courts... to interpret the intended meaning of the law.

And then they complain about 'activist judges' who tell them their laws, as written, are crap and can't possibly stand in law.

If you can't pass a law which is actually compatible with your legal frame work, don't be surprised when a judge rules it void because it violated half a dozen legal foundations.

And the TOS for a web site could be random, arbitrary, and illegal ... there is no attempt whatsoever to address this. "By visiting this site, you owe me $1000 and a blowjob" or any other crap that has no place in contract law, and there's no attempt to ensure you're not waiving rights you're not supposed to be able to waive (like class action suits for instance).

This is just more stupidity to pander to big business and screw the rest of us.

A principle even older than the 1st amendment

[waterbear]

A significant principle of the 'rule of law' and 'freedom under the law' for a long time has been that there should be no penalty without a law that imposes it. The principle is so old it was there in Latin too, "nulla poena sine lege", and some (including me) regard it as one of the important foundation-stones of a free society.

What the maxim didn't spell out (maybe because it was thought obvious, or should be) is that the law needs to be one that makes it clear and specific enough so that people know in advance what the penalty-earning conduct is going to be.

The ingenuity of some modern legislators subverts this principle while pretending to respect it. They design and pass blanket laws -- such as, arguably, the CFAA -- which are so broad, that they generically criminalize harmful and harmless conduct alike (or, harmful conduct along with other conduct that ought to be considered harmless except it goes against the interests of the legislators' friends). It seems to be assumed (occasionally said right out) that the harmless acts swept up into the breadth of the law will be treated as 'de minimis'. Then it is left to the discretion of prosecutors to pick the cases 'really' deserving of punishment.

Of course one big question about these blanket laws is whether prosecutors should be trusted with that kind of power (I'd answer 'no', and point to the recent Aaron Swartz case).

But an even bigger issue is that the result of subverting the principle of 'nulla poena sine lege' in this way is, that no-one really knows any more what conduct is going to be forbidden in practice. A whole lot of folk get theoretically criminalised for the harmless actions swept up into the over-broad laws, and can only rely on the legal system ignoring the 'de minimis' actions. This is obnoxious for so many reasons, including that harmless acts ought not to be criminalized even theoretically. But it is worse when the blanket law becomes used as justification or pretext for punishment when a prosecutor wants to really get nasty with somebody for some quite ulterior reason not made publicly known. Then the real motivation for punishment can become deceitfully concealed under a veneer of sanctimony '. . .but he broke the law'.

I can hardly think of any subversion of the legal system more poisonous to freedom and the rule of law than this.

-wb-