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Obama Authorizes Penalties For Foreign Cyber Attackers
An anonymous reader writes President Barack Obama has today signed an executive order extending the U.S. administration's power to respond to malicious cyberattacks and espionage campaigns. The order enforces financial sanctions on foreign hackers who action attacks against American businesses, institutions and citizens. It will enable the secretary of the Treasury, along with the attorney general and secretary of State, to inflict penalties on cyber criminals behind hacking attacks which "create a significant threat to U.S. national security, foreign policy or economic health or financial stability of the United States," Obama said. Sanctions could include freezing of assets or a total ban on commercial trade.
I'm tired of these April Fool's articles!
This is ridiculous. Law is part of the agreement between citizens and their government. Citizens get certain benefits like public education and healthcare, and in return must pay the government taxes and obey their laws. If the citizen disagrees with this, he can resign his citizenship, but by doing so loses the benefits of citizenship as well.
Foreigners, on the other hand, have no such agreement, and therefore it's ridiculous to charge them. What's next, Saudi Arabia charges me for having a beer tonight? North Korea charges me for criticizing their regime? Should I serious have to look up every single country's law before I do something, just to make sure I'm not breaking some obscure country's law?
Obama has no authority to impose sanctions on anybody for these acts, unless (1) Congress passes a law that says he does or (2) a foreign country says he does, creating jurisdiction. Neither has happened.
Obama said "From now on, we have the power to freeze their assets, make it harder for them to do business with U.S. companies, and limit their ability to profit from their misdeeds" in the making (apparently) of an executive order. If the power existed, it existed prior to Mr. Obama's order because it was authorized by 1 or 2 above. Mr. Obama's declarations of power are worthy of the bottom of my birdcage.
This idiot of a reporter at The Stack dot com thinks that an executive order is "legislation". Someone should inform her that legislation almost always appears in the U.S. Code, not in some press release on the White House Blog. I can't wait for this administration to try to enforce these sanctions: they're going to get tossed out of court on their rear ends if they try.