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The Latest Victims of Justice Department Overreach

The Latest Victims of Justice Department Overreach
Tue, 3/19/2013 - by Demand Progress

This has to stop.

In case after case, the Department of Justice continues to abuse the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Yesterday, Andrew ‘weev’ Auernheimer was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for revealing to the media that AT&T had configured its servers to allow access to iPad owners’ unsecured email addresses.

And last Thursday, the CFAA was used to indict Matthew Keys, the 26-year-old deputy social media editor at Reuters, for providing a username and password so that Anonymous could execute a harmless and victimless prank—momentarily changing an Los Angeles Times headline.

Now Keys faces up to 15 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

Weev identified a flaw and harmed no one. Matthew Keys was party to a harmless prank. Both face years in prison under the CFAA. Click here to call on congress to reform this ridiculous law.

The key problem with the CFAA is that it allows prosecutors to treat violations of ‘terms-of-use’ agreements—all that fine print you ‘agree to’ but hardly ever read when you sign up for a website or log on to a computer—as felonies.

That means that if you lie about your height or weight on a dating profile, or check ESPN or Gchat at work, you could be convicted of a felony under the CFAA. As the New Yorker’s Tim Wu put it, the DOJ’s interpretation of the CFAA makes “the American desk-worker a felon.”

We absolutely must reform the CFAA before the DOJ puts more people away for harmless, victimless crimes.

It is precisely the DOJ’s overbroad interpretation of the CFAA that allowed federal prosecutors to charge net freedom activist and Demand Progress cofounder Aaron Swartz with twelve felonies—amounting to a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines—for downloading too many academic articles too fast from an MIT computer.

And as you’ve probably heard, Aaron’s loved ones believe that it was the weight of this abusive and absurdly punitive prosecution which contributed to Aaron’s decision to take his own life in January.

The CFAA reforms are being called “Aaron’s Law” in honor of our friend. Tell your lawmaker to support Aaron’s Law today.

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