Congresswoman proposes amendment to computer fraud law honoring Aaron Swartz

A draft bill to exclude terms of service violations from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is to be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Image: Demand Progress

Aaron Swartz

The proposed amendment to the anti-hacking law comes in the wake of the suicide on Friday by Internet activist and computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud and other crimes for allegedly accessing and downloading millions of documents from the JSTOR online database through the network of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Swartz allegedly intended to distribute a significant proportion of JSTOR’s archive through file-sharing sites. If convicted, he could have faced up to 35 years in prison and a fine of $1 million.

The government was able to bring disproportionate charges against Swartz because of the broad scope of CFAA and the wire fraud statute, wrote Representative Zoe Lofgren in a post on Tuesday on the Reddit news-sharing site in which Swartz played a key role. “It looks like the government used the vague wording of those laws to claim that violating an online service’s user agreement or terms of service is a violation of the CFAA and the wire fraud statute,” she said.

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Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2025393/congresswoman-proposes-amendment-to-computer-fraud-law-honoring-aaron-swartz.html

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