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This is a freeze, not a forfeiture.

Once your money is frozen and you have no money for the very high priced lawyers necessary to get it back, this is a distinction without a difference. The government's primary use of asset freezes is to paralyze a target's ability to defend themselves. Well financed defendants able to exercise their rights are a nuisance to bloodthirsty federal prosecutors, and executive orders like this one are designed to remove that nuisance. There is a reason that federal conviction rates are, for all intents and purposes, 100%.

You know, I addressed that in the very next sentence. Maybe you could just slow down and read the whole thing a couple of times before leaping to disagree.

So you are saying that this law will never impede anyone from paying for a lawyer? If the answer is "I don't know", the point still stands.

I read it, I don't see where you addressed it.

I can't see where its addressed either. Could OP update the comment?

I told you: in the very next sentence. Here is the second sentence of my previous post, again:

Also, it won't affect people in terms of legal advice, plea deals etc. because it only applies to people who launch attacks on critical infrastructure from outside the country, and thus beyond the reach of US police.

Sorry if this doesn't clear things up for you, but how much simpler do you expect me to make it? It is a pretty straightforward sentence, even though it does contain a small grammar mistake (it should read '...and are thus beyond the reach...').

You're stating that because someone is suspected of launching an attack from outside the US that they are "beyond the reach of US police". This is not a valid assumption. The US government has extradition agreements with most of the world's developed countries, and even where it doesn't, often applies political pressure to get what it wants.

As an aside, this order is far more broad than you state here. It extends to people that have done business with them, in any capacity. That will in many cases extend to US citizens.

This is really important for people to understand and I don't think enough people are aware of this distinction. Thank you!

> This is a freeze, not a forfeiture.

Here's an example of a person whose computer equipment was seized during a warrant-backed search.

He was never charged. He was never even arrested. 15 months later, the police still held the equipment.

http://www.justanswer.com/law/3u8hd-long-may-police-keep-pro...

Freeze / forfeiture blurs into one with those sort of timescales.

In the UK it is scary. The police can hold your property for as long as is deemed necessary. If they claim that giving it back could assist you in pursuing another 'crime', you will never see it again. And not a penny of redress.

http://www.ukpolicelawblog.com/2013/05/08/retaining-property...

Hope you have off-site backups.

You're guilty until proven innocent. Its not right to start punishing a person before his guilt is proven.

> launch attacks on critical infrastructure from outside the country

First, "outside the the country" is a nebulous thing. For example, I suspect that a NSA and/or GCHQ trick is to simply route traffic[1] so it flows over an international fiber so it becomes "foreign" in origin. The bad BGP routes that redirected traffic through

More importantly, the executive order does not reference "critical infrastructure" (itself a vary vague term that includes "safety" and "security" (unqualified)). Instead, it references[2] "critical infrastructure sector".

    (A) harming, or otherwise significantly compromising
    the provision of services by, a computer or network 
    of computers that support one or more entities in a
    critical infrastructure sector;

Which it defines as:

    (d) the term "critical infrastructure sector" means any
    of the designated critical infrastructure sectors
    identified in Presidential Policy Directive 21

PPD-21's list[3] of the "Designated Critical Infrastructure Sectors" includes:

    Commercial Facilities
    Communications
    Financial Services
    Government Facilities
    Information Technology

It would not take much imagination at all to construe various petty offenses, legitimate (but disliked) use cases, and simple accidents as "attacks" or "disruption" of some insignificant government service. Is screen scraping a business's website too fast count as "harming" a "commercial facility" that should allow accounts to be frozen without due process?

The vagueness of this is terrifying.

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[1] http://research.dyn.com/2013/11/mitm-internet-hijacking/

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/04/01/execu...

[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/presi...

Those are reasonable points, but ones which I think rely a little too heavily on an assumption of bad faith/worst-case scenario as opposed to a mechanism that works well most of the time but occasionally fails, eg people have been mistakenly added to the SDN list and had trouble getting off it, but the bulk of the entries are legitimate. I think it's important to weigh the non-zero potential for abuse, which we should absolutely take seriously, against the equally real and arguably much greater incidence of actual malfeasance, against which we have an entirely legitimate interest in protecting ourselves.