Too much information! Give me examples:

 

• You would be a criminal if you share a link, without ever following it, to movies, music, or leaked documents. 

 

• Do you surf facebook at work? You might be a hacker! The way the proposal is worded, any unauthorized access of information would be considered a crime. Many corporate policies, for instance, disallow the use of work computers for nonwork purposes. This would potentially make things like browsing Facebook at work a felony.

 

• Do you use Netflix?  An example: Netflix specifically disallows sharing your account password. Sharing it anyway would make you guilty of a felony.

  • Incidentally, this would also make violating certain terms of end-user agreements a felony. Who reads the agreements for their websites and software? No one thats who. (what was the last oen you read in full?)

 

• As an IT professional, I am on a mailing list with other IT professionals, including infosec professionals. If said infosec professionals violated the CFAA, I would be guilty of racketeering under the proposed changes because we share a mailing list. -AM

 

• Journalism in the public interest would also be seriously affected. If, for instance, information from government computers was leaked showing government wrongdoing, accessing that information -- even if delivered to them personally -- would make journalists guilty of a felony.
  This means we would never have seen the documents Edward Snowden leaked.

 

• "A reminder... The legislation which is going to be proposed during the state of the union tonight will have the side affect of criminalizing thousands of researchers like myself who are struggling to keep you and your family safe on the internet." - Gillis Jones (If these researchers don't find the bad things and tell companies about it and help them fix the problems, you think criminals will tell a company they found out there is a security hole that lets them get all sorts of good information? nope! now you are less secure - Nicole)

  • This loses us thousands of jobs when we need people to have jobs!

    • Just counting those with certs, which isn't everyone, there are 69,464 ISC2 certified in the US, 64,297 SANS/GIAC certifications, and over 20,000 certified eitherical hackers (anyone have more stats?)

  • It harms national security by removing those who are hired to protect private companies.

  • It harms national security by turning potential recruits into criminals. 

 

• Have you shared or seen passwords? For example in a pastebin or post it note? helped a coworker access a system to get things done? You would be a criminal. "Password Sharing Is a Federal Crime, Appeals Court Rules" Example: Sharing WiFi credentials with your contacts in Windows 10.

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• CFAA, caused a man to hang himself.

  From Wikipedia

  Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer and Internet hacktivist who was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS[3] and the Markdown publishing format,[4] the organization Creative Commons,[5] the website framework web.py[6] and the social news site, Reddit, in which he became a partner after its merger with his company, Infogami.[i] He committed suicide while under federal indictment for data-theft, a prosecution that was characterized by his family as being "the product of a criminal-justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach".[7]

  On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by MIT police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after systematically downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR.[12][13] Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[14] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.[15]

  Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself.[7][16]"

   

  EFF and others proposed an update to make CFAA less draconian. “Aaron’s Law”, proposed by Zoe Lofgren in 2013, would have amended the CFAA to set a higher bar for convictions by making deliberate circumvention of technical restrictions to unauthorized information a required element of the crime. It also lessened penalties for smaller violations. The bill died in committee.