Obama wants Congress to increase prison sentences for hackers
Proposal also expands hacking definition. That’s a “dangerous idea,” expert says. by David Kravets - Jan 14 2015, 5:15pm EST

During next week’s State of the Union address, the president is set to publicly urge increased prison time and other changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—the statute that was used to prosecute Internet activist Aaron Swartz before he committed suicide in 2013.

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Among other things, penalties under Obama’s plan would increase from a maximum five-year penalty to 10 years for pure hacking acts, like circumventing a technological barrier. What’s more, the law would expand the definition of what “exceeds authorized access” means. A hacker would exceed authorization when accessing information “for a purpose that the accesser knows is not authorized by the computer owner.”

Have you ever deleted or otherwise restricted cookies? That might get you past a paywall that you were not even aware of. While browsing a pron site, have you ever manually tweaked a URL from …1.jpg to …2.jpg to explore the site? Truncated a URL to try navigating to a higher level in the directory? Ever downloaded a file that included a copyright notice and a warning like “no copying by any means is permitted without prior written permission”?

Might cost you 10 years, now. For each violation.