Digital liberties activists are ginning up support for their efforts to reform a law that they say could potentially turns millions of Americans into criminals.
Advocacy groups Demand Progress and the Internet Defense League (IDL) — a loose coalition that includes Mozilla, WordPress, Reddit, Public Knowledge and many other companies and organizations — announced the launch of a “week of action” Monday.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984 was first enacted to reduce hacking into U.S. government computers and the computers of financial institutions. Unauthorized access to computers affecting interstate or foreign commerce and communication are also governed by the law.
The law is problematic to activists and analysts, however, because of how broadly the law can be interpreted by law enforcement.
Various actions that might be considered innocent by every day citizens — such as sharing social media passwords with friends, starting a pseudonymous social media profile, “exaggerating one’s height on a dating site” and visiting sites with age restrictions while underage — could technically be in violation of the law.
The CFAA also criminalizes the blocking of cookies “in a way that enables one to circumvent a new site’s paywall,” says Demand Progress.
It was the tragic suicide of late free speech activist and Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz in January, though, that spurred the members of the coalition into action.
Swartz — who was a co-founder of Demand Progress, as well as having been credited as a co-founder of Reddit — was also pursued under the CFAA after he allegedly downloaded 4.5 million research documents from the academic research service JSTOR and released them to the public in 2011.
The federal government dropped the charges against Swartz after his death. If he had been convicted, he could have faced up to $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison.
David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, said in a statement that Swartz’s death “has illuminated the absurdity of the CFAA as never before.”