full-disclosure - House approves spyware legislation

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Message-ID: <200410061917.i96JHNXk032635@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu)
Subject: House approves spyware legislation 

On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 12:04:37 EDT, Mark Shirley said:

> criminals who are caught.  Hopefully the ones who contribute the most
> to the problem. Personally I don't see a single aspect of this law
> that hurts hacking.

(Note - it's a "bill" until it passes both House and Senate and gets
signed by the President.  *Then* it's a law)...

If you mean "old-school" hacking, the new bill is neutral.  If you meant
"hacking" in the now-common meaning of "breaking into systems", then the
new bill is pointless - if it doesn't hurt breaking into systems, why pass it?

A previous poster made some very correct comments about updating laws to
match new circumstances.  The big question here:

1) Does this bill actually fix a "corner case" where previously, the prohibited
behavior was clearly undesirable, but no law actually addressed the issue?

or

2) Is this bill merely a pre-election "feel good and generate PR" move (remember,
all 435 members of the house are up for re-election in a few weeks)?

Can anybody point at a *specific* case where the new bill changes the balance
of power? I haven't read the text yet - will it do nothing because everybody
who's likely to get caught is *already* breaking the laws already existent,
or should we be cheering "Hooray, now we can finally (arrest, file civil
actions against, etc) that Sleazeball XYZ who created/distributes  Spyware Foo"?
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