Back to the topic at hand: Crime, Punishment and the possible Rise of the Hacking Hero!

              Okay, so I started looking around for articles talking about the crime and punishment of hacktivists that were prosecuted.  I found a great article in The Washington Post titled "Aaron Swartz and the rise of the hacktivist hero".  In this article, the author Dominic Basulto talks about the "silver lining" in Swartz suicide and the attention it brought to hacktivists.  Aaron was more than the average hacktivist, he was a profound voice of freedom and democracy.  Consistently pushing for net neutrality and open information, Swartz even founded a group called Demand Progress.  Upon his death, a huge outpouring of support and ideas came about.  One particular idea was a petition to allow DoS or DDoS attacks to become a legal form protest, instead of a punishable crime equating to several years in prison.  Makes sense, right?  This particular instance of hacktivism, in my opinion, should not be illegal.  As I stated in previous posts, it's no different than a traditional "sit-in" protest.  That sounds like progress moving forward for a generation who lives on the Internet, but looking around some more I found what is surely a step backwards.

               I found an article in the International Business Times titled "CFAA 2013: Congress' New Draft Could Incarcerate Teenagers That Read New Online", and well it means just what it says.  If you look back two posts on my blog, I talk about the CFAA laws currently in place.  But here in April there will be a vote on the new CFAA bill and it looks ugly.  The author of the article, Dave Smith,  talks about how not only could a person get prosecuted for violating the terms of service within a site, but now also for using a site in any way that it wasn't meant to be used listed under a daunting "Terms of Use".  This means even teenagers reading news on sites like Popular Mechanics could be prosecuted.  These sites do state that you must be 18 years old to proceed, but through links from other sites one could end up on a site they shouldn't be and theoretically go to jail for it.  Has Washington lost their minds?  Contrary to the stance this article takes, there are limits we need that protect website owner's interests, but this is getting out of control.  It goes back to my theory of lawmakers being scared of the new generation.  Maybe they think if they slap enough laws down on the table people will be too scared to manipulate the web and speak freely.  Try telling that Wikileaks or Aaron Swartz.  This new bill will only rile up groups like Anonymous and others to attack more government sites and private information of lawmakers.  In my opinion, hack away boys!  It feels like our government would be happy with a free democratic society physically and a communist regime online.  Hopefully people will write their congressman and get this new CFAA bill thrown out.

                Remember the Stop Online Piracy Act?  This bill was set up to stop people from stealing music, videos and other intellectual property.  Sounds good on the surface, but the reality was that this bill was peppered with little things like law enforcement being able to take down entire domains, or websites, just on the basis of things as small as a person posting a comment with a link to a song or piece of media deemed illegal.  Thankfully big guys like Google and Craigslist got involved and the bill eventually died.  But that is not end of SOPA, there are more lawmakers drafting new versions currently.  Where I am going with this is simply the fact that we cannot let our U.S. government lock down our Internet like China or Iran.  This was paramount to Aaron Swartz and Wikileaks.  The Internet should remain as free as our physical society.  This is the message of most hacktivist groups.  Wow, that was a mouthful! I'll end this post with a great video about the new CFAA bill and what it means for people.