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Comment by Jiro | Hacker News Reader

This is good and bad at the same time. It's like having a law that says that the police can shoot anyone at will, and then announcing that since people were concerned that the police would shoot someone going to the grocery store, all police are ordered to not do that.

It's better than shooting people for going to the grocery store, but the real problem is the law.

What's actually happened is that the government interprets the CFAA so broadly that it's easily abused, people have been pointing this out in court, and the government response is to keep the broad interpretation but announce they won't enforce those specific abusive examples. What they should do is admit that their interpretation is too broad; this is smoke and mirrors to avoid doing so.

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The US government isn't unitary. The executive branch controls enforcement policy, the judicial branch controls interpretation, and those can disagree. Your “they” refers to separate institutions that do not have control over each other.

He's implicitly saying that the legislative branch is failing here, so yeah, it's bad overall. Plus the executive branch does have significant control over legislation, and it's also bad that they're not trying to fix the law.

Overall, this individual move by the justice department is good, but it's bad that more isn't being done.

CFAA has actually narrowed quite a lot.

The law isn't crazy as written; it's crazy as misinterpreted. Van Buren v. United States is the Supreme Court case that tossed out most of the batshit crazy interpretations. Today, MIT wouldn't be able to Schwartz people as easily as it did in years past.

(And yes, MIT kept threatening folks like whistleblowers under the CFAA to get them to sign NDAs long after Schwartz; to Schwartz someone was a verb around MIT)

It's "Swartz".

> This is good and bad at the same time. It's like having a law that says that the police can shoot anyone at will, and then announcing that since people were concerned that the police would shoot someone going to the grocery store, all police are ordered to not do that.

I'm not sure you intended for this to sound really grim, but it does, since this is the de facto law in the United States right now.

> What they should do is admit that their interpretation is too broad; this is smoke and mirrors to avoid doing so.

It seems to me that these guidelines are their admission that previous interpretations had been too broad. I'm curious what you would otherwise expect to see (like, actually just curious; hopefully that doesn't sound confrontational).

I would expect that a law that can be interpreted too broadly should have its text changed so that such broad interpretations are impossible.

Our legislative branch is completely ineffectual though.

One more step toward in an authoritarian direction. Vague laws with arbitrary interpretations are bad for democracy.

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