jimpeel
Well-Known Member
Now they want to prosecute those who lie on the Internet.
SOURCE
SOURCE
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Justice Department wants to make lying about your weight a crime
The Justice Department wants to prosecute people who use a fake name on Facebook, lie about their weight on dating sites, or violate a website's terms of service.
(THE BLAZE) -- Don’t want information to be associated with your real name? Don’t want to tell people on Match.com how much you really weigh? There’s a simple solution for situations like these that many on the Internet have been doing since its inception: lying.
But did you know this could violate the website’s terms of use? Have you even read the terms of use for websites you frequent?
You may want to start, as the Department of Justice is pushing for lying on the Internet to be a prosecutable crime — if it violates the terms and conditions of websites where the lie takes place . CNET has more:
The law must allow “prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider,” Richard Downing, the Justice Department’s deputy computer crime chief, will tell the U.S. Congress [today].
Scaling back that law “would make it difficult or impossible to deter and address serious insider threats through prosecution,” and jeopardize prosecutions involving identity theft, misuse of government databases, and privacy invasions, according to Downing.
CNET describes how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act had been used by the Justice Department to convict Lori Drew in 2008 for using a fake name on MySpace to harass a 13-year-old girl who then ended up committing suicide. The conviction was later dismissed:
What makes this possible is a section of the CFAA that was never intended to be used that way: a general-purpose prohibition on any computer-based act that “exceeds authorized access.” To the Justice Department, this means that a website‘s terms of service define what’s “authorized” or not, and ignoring them can turn you into a felon.