Good god, this is stupid.<p><i>The damage was trivial, yet he is threatened with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in damages and up to twenty-five years in prison.</i><p>Really? The prosecutor is seeking the maximum statutory penalty for this? Somehow I doubt that.<p><i>All the Administration needs to do is to rely on the ancient common-law principle called the “rule of lenity.” This states that ambiguous criminal laws should be construed in favor of a defendant.</i><p>BY A COURT. The rule of lenity is something that is supposed to guide the behavior of <i>judges</i>.<p>This is lousy journalism, which misleads the audience in an attempt to pander to their sensibilities. There is no way the author of this piece ran it past a lawyer.
Perhaps we should make a site who's terms of service explicitly bars use by members of congress. Once some member of congress goes to the site, we try to get them put in jail, at which point they'll change the law.
The law of any overly generalized and overly complex law: the law is no good.<p>Don't try to repair it. Rip it out and establish clear, concise, use-case specific laws, when necessary.
Does Matthew Keys deserve to mentioned alongside Aaron Swartz? Swartz's actions seem somehow more... noble. Both of them "abused" their access, but Swartz did so to make a political point about scientific knowledge, in the hopes of improving our society. I can't discern what Keys's motivations were in this case.<p>It's possible however that this makes Keys a "better" defendant, in that the law is clearly unjust even in his case.
The author of the article has overlooked something ancient and obvious. Jury nullification (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification</a>) is exactly for laws such as this one. It's been part of English-based common law for many centuries. If the Swartz case had reached trial and I had been a juror, the chances of me nullifying the "worst law in technology" would have been near 100%. I'm sure most of us feel the same way. If I'm right, the problem is not as bad as the author makes it seem.