Many technology-law experts feel there's too much leeway for prosecutors under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, allowing prosecutors to rack up serious charges for what may seem like minor offenses to outsiders.
The Aaron Swartz case may be a perfect example of such overreach. The young programmer, who was indicted twice under the CFAA, faced 50 years in prison for allegedly downloading 4 million academic-journal articles.
Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment last week, two days after his lawyer and prosecutors reportedly failed to reach a plea deal.
Adam Goldstein, an attorney advocate at the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va., said, "the language of [the CFAA] could be tighter, [but] that's not why things are going horribly wrong" with computer-related prosecutions.
"What's going wrong with these prosecutions," he said, "is that any prosecutor in any corner of the country can prosecute a computer crime, even though he or she may know absolutely nothing about computers and have only a rudimentary understanding of what the laws were even designed to prohibit."
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