How Obama's Hacking Laws Could Make You a Criminal

[NACBA]

Computer-security researchers fear President Barack Obama’s proposed changes to federal hacking laws could put them out of business, could make computers less secure overall, and could put some of them — and maybe even you — in prison.

"Under the new proposal, sharing your HBO GO password with a friend would be a felony," Nate Cardozo, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, told an audience of researchers and IT pros Saturday (Jan. 17) at ShmooCon 2015, a security conference held annually in Washington, D.C.

Obama showcased the proposals in his State of the Union address Wednesday night (Jan. 20). The changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), first implemented in 1984, might make many commonplace security-research practices — and media reporting on those practices — federal crimes. Even sharing passwords for online accounts would potentially be punishable.

"Believe what you’ve heard" about Obama’s proposals, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, warned this past Friday (Jan. 16) at ShmooCon 2015.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/how-obamas-hacking-laws-could-make-you-a-criminal-108737789274.html

[rg17]

The comments are horrible.

[DamianTV]

http://i.imgur.com/hx6Ts06.png

Letting your friends come over to watch a show on TV makes you no more of a Criminal than sharing your passwords.

Their wet dream would be to charge you for going to your friends house to watch some show that they pay for. To charge per person for watching a DVD at home. To charge per person for listening to a song in your car. It is a Cash Cow for them that bleeds us dry.

[muh_roads]

The MPAA and the RIAA will probably draft the bill.

[tangent4ronpaul]

Was reading that it would become illegal to post links or click on them. Well, at least some links like WikiLeaks or Der Speigle.

-t

[DamianTV]

Was reading that it would become illegal to post links or click on them. Well, at least some links like WikiLeaks or Der Speigle.

-t

So how are we even supposed to know that said links are illegal if they are obfuscated with URL Shorteners?

For example, instead of seeing http://www.somewebsite.com/somecontent.php?some_arg=someval&some_otherarg=someval a URL Shortener would simply spit out http://t.co/78afsh0ha

Are we psychic? We cant even know we have committed a crime until we have clicked a link?

*sigh* FOUR Felonies per day...