giuliomagnificoAnti-cybercrime laws are being weaponized to repress journalism
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/nigeria-pakistan-jordan-cybercrime-laws-journalism.php
US federal regulations are full of laws that take something minor or completely legal, and add huge punishments because someone used technology. All the way back in 1952, fraud punishments were worse if someone used a telephone to commit fraud. In 1982 the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act added even more punishment, if someone used a computer.
Fraud is bad, and it should be illegal, but why have different punishments based on what technology someone used?
Laws like this go outside of fraud, and often are clearly unconstitutional, like the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, which made lawful gambling illegal too, until it was effectively overturned with Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association in 2018.
The big problem with CFAA isn't particular to CFAA at all; it's that it shares the 2B1.1 loss table with all the other federal criminal statutes, and computers are very good and very fast at running the number on that table up. It's a real problem and I'm not pushing back on the idea that something should change about it, but I wouldn't characterize the problem the way you do, as the law singling out crimes involving computers.
Part of the history of CFAA was that it was passed because the state of the law preceding it didn't comfortably criminalize things like malicious hacking and denial of service; you can do those things without tripping over wire fraud.
There ought to just be a blanket criminal law for intentionally causing financial damages to citizens over a certain amount. Fraud is typically a civil matter, but the problem comes when someone causes $5000 of fraud to 200 people, which is made much easier by the internet. It doesn't make financial sense to sue for that amount. If we had a law that intentionally causing $1 million or more of civil damages is also a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison this would allow DAs to apply well deserved criminal penalties without having the possibility of criminalizing harmless behavior.
Fraud is almost definitionally not a civil matter. There is civil fraud, but it bears the same relationship to fraud as the Goldman's wrongful death case did to the OJ criminal case.
I'm not talking about technical definitions. The fact is that if you have a fraud case in the USA, there's a 99% chance civil court is the only place it's ever going to be filed.
It's not a statistic. It's my personal experience in business and what my lawyers have told me. The 99% is just a number I pulled out of my ass to mean "basically always." If I were going to put money on it, though, I would say it's actually an understatement. Do you have any statistics?