Bradley Manning and "hacker madness" scare tactic
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First, the decision continues a trend of government prosecutions that use familiarity with digital tools and knowledge of computers as a scare tactic and a basis for obtaining grossly disproportionate and unfair punishments, strategies enabled by broad, vague laws like the CFAA and the Espionage Act. Let's call this the "hacker madness" strategy. Using it, the prosecution portrays actions taken by someone using a computer as more dangerous or scary than they actually are by highlighting the digital tools used to a nontechnical or even technophobic judge.
In the Manning case, the prosecution used Manning's use of a standard, more than 15-year-old Unix program called Wget to collect information, as if it were a dark and nefarious technique. Of course, anyone who has ever called up this utility on a Unix machine, which at this point is likely millions of ordinary Americans, knows that this program is no more scary or spectacular (and far less powerful) than a simple Google search. Yet the court apparently didn't know this and seemed swayed by it.
We've seen this trick before. In a case that we at the Electronic Frontier Foundation handled in 2009, Boston College police used the fact that our client worked on a Linux operating system with "a black screen with white font" as part of a basis for a search warrant. Luckily the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed out the warrant after EFF got involved, but who knows what would have happened had we not been there. And happily, Oracle got a big surprise when it tried a similar trick in Oracle v. Google and discovered that the judge was a programmer who sharply called them on it.
But law enforcement keeps using this technique, likely based on a calculation that most judges aren't as technical as ordinary Americans, may even be afraid of technology, and can be swayed by the ominous use of technical jargon and techniques – playing to media stereotypes of evil computer geniuses. Indeed the CFAA itself apparently was a response to President Ronald Reagan's fears after watching the completely fictional movie War Games.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23981-bradley-manning-and-hacker-madness-scare-tactic.html
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