US Wiretapping laws are so wide and out of date that most internet users commit at least three crimes a day, according to a new book. (I'm sure I manage more than three. sub.ed.)

Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate has just penned a new book "Three Felonies a Day" in which he claims that technology has moved so fast that the law can't keep up. He said technology exacerbates the problem of laws so open and vague that they are hard to abide by, to the point that we have all become potential criminals.

New technology makes innocent activity potentially criminal. Silverglate said that the problem is made worse because prosecutors didn't understand or didn't want to understand technology. In one case, prosecutors tried to throw the book at an ISP for momentarily copying messages as they made their way through the system. They claimed this was listening in on communications. No judge made the obvious point that this is how ISPs operate.

US law is based on English law which has a very good protection against such daft prosecutions. In the UK you have to prove that someone intended to do the crime. However since the 1980s prosecutors to abandon the principle that there can't be a crime without criminal intent, which means you can be locked up for something you thought was safe, Silverglate said.

Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it.