House Bill 6974 is Evil

Posted on January 19th, 2010. Written by Rico.

When a law is worded too vaguely, it usually gives the government too much power. That’s the evil with House Bill 6974.

Luckily however, Rep. Mong Palatino is calling attention to problem with this bill. In its current form, 6974 gives the authorities a virtual carte blanche to control content online—or at least declare content they don’t like as criminal. Quote from Palatino:

“For example, for the government to pin-point an activity which is criminal in nature according to the Act, it has to monitor all other activities of an individual at a given time, and worse may expose the activities of other individuals using the same computer system or server at the same time. For the government to access a malicious file in an individual’s hard drive, it has to confiscate and search through the entire storage device, thus exposing all other personal files and correspondence to government access and intrusion, even those unrelated to the ‘cybercrime’.

“This is dangerous because it gives the government an excuse to justify illegal fishing expeditions against ordinary citizens and allows the wanton violation of the strict requirements in criminal procedure.”

The simple solution? A clear definition of the term “cybercrimes”. Read the complete text of House Bill 6974 here.