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ACLU Lawsuit Challenges Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice contending that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act's criminal prohibitions have created a barrier for those wishing to conduct research and anti-discrimination testing online. The ACLU have pursued the matter on behalf of a group of academic researchers, computer scientists and journalists seeking to remove that barrier to allow for third-party testing and research into potential online discrimination. In a public statement the ACLU contend: "The CFAA violates the First Amendment because it limits everyone, including academics and journalists, from gathering the publicly available information necessary to understand and speak about online discrimination."
One of the provisions makes it a felony for unauthorized access to a computer system. In most EULAs it spells out that reverse engineering is disallowed and creates an area of unauthorized access. Thus a security researcher trying to analyze a system is technically committing a felony under the CFAA as it doesn't make any exceptions. Even if the analysis is being performed completely locally on systems they own if say the OS is Windows or MacOS.
Probably the analogy would be the laws making it illegal to record abuses at places like food processing plants. There have been several states that have attempted to outlaw undercover video, after activists managed to get hired, and later released video of the horrible and illegal stuff that was going on in those plants. Or consider bans against recording the police on video, that wind up making any video recording of the police, even of the police committing a blatant crime, illegal.
That doesn't mean the law needs to go away entirely, but having some sort of affirmative defense should play a part, for instance.
The law abiding citizens who happen to be gun owners are the ones who are ultimately tasked with upholding their gun rights. The efforts of the NRA just represent the non-violent method of upholding gun rights. And unlike the corporate lobbyists the NRA doesn't buy political support with money they buy political support with the number of voters they can deliver at election time. The anti-gun crowd is shrill at times and relish turning every gun related death into an extinction level event but they are vastly outnumbered by gun owners who only need to vote when they feel their gun ownership rights are being reduced.