You committed three crimes today
US Wiretapping laws are so wide and out of date that most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.