Academics call for UK's Computer Misuse Act 1990 to be reformed Britain's main anti-hacker law, the Computer Misuse Act 1990, is "confused", "outdated" and "ambiguous", according to a group of pro-reform academics. A report launched this morning by the Criminal Law Reform Now Network (CLRNN) described a "range of measures to better tailor existing offences in line with our international …
Does the Vladivostok telephone directory still exist?
Or is the data-sharing agreement between the FSB (KGB,NKVD,OGPU,Cheka, whatever) allow you to just mutter "I should call Vlad" and your phone will figure out which Vlad you mean, given the time of day, your location, what you last ate and drank, and which particular constellation of keywords was in your most recent text message. Maybe also taking into account billboards on buses passing your location and the probability of you having noticed one of your known associates walking on the other side of the street.
In any case, how could any right-minded citizen countenance the untrustworthy fellows blabbing about exactly how that works?
We don't want hacking done for paparrazi-like reasons to be defensible in the public interest.
There was a recent column in the Guardian about how the attacks on Harry and Meghan are likely motivated by the fact that the newspapers involved have also been paying large financial settlements to people accusing them of telephone hacking, so far successfully keeping the matter out of the courts. The Royals are less in need of money than most people, so Harry and Meghan pose a danger of making this strategy ultimately fail.
"The Royals are less in need of money than most people, so Harry and Meghan pose a danger of making this strategy ultimately fail."
I guess you haven't been keeping up with current events. Mr Windsor and Ms Markle are no longer part of the Firm, and need to find £2.5m pronto.
Thanks hmv, but it's not actually even what the public should be interested in, but what is in the interests of the public - i.e. tending to public good or preventing public harm. Whether the public is actually interested in that is immaterial. Almost everyone (including politicians and journalists) assume that what the any vociferous subset of the public happens to be interested in is automatically "in the public interest" whereas it's frequently the exact opposite.
Not even really "what they should be interested in" but what it in their best interest, i.e. what is conducive to the common good - a completely different meaning of the word "interest" that has nothing at all to do with whether we want to know about something.
Let the punishment fit the crime comes close. Fines for civil misdemeanour's need to be added to remove matters that do not belong under criminal matters.
The original drafting was deliberately penned wide so DPP's job was easier, and because defence clauses would be complicated in an international setting. Most importantly contributory negligence needs to explicitly added for the defence. Yes a rewrite is needed, but they won't because Assauge cases need excuses for easy extradition. We already know UK law does not measure up to the more honourable and honest EU standards.
The CMA has been pretty ineffectual ever since its inception in 1990. For example, it took a decade and a half to get a reckless denial of service offence into the Act (Police and Justice Act 2006, S.36) despite the first ever DoS (the Morris worm) being a reckless attack. A survey I conducted at that time showed that the Act was hardly ever invoked where an alternative ground for prosecution was available, largely because police forces typically didn't understand how to interpret it.
One of our contributions to the 2004 APIG public enquiry into the first revision of the act recommended that a framework of definitions be included in the Act (or referred to if an adequate one was already established elsewhere), as it was clearly also beyond the capacities of the judiciary to get their heads round the technicalities of many instances of computer misuse. However Parliament decided that this was impractical as creating durable definitions was beyond them too.
Since then, the Act has continued on much the same trajectory despite further revision. What's really needed is not yet more revision of a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation, but to start from scratch from a different standpoint - that of outcomes, rather than of technically oriented actions, as offences. After all, it's the results that matter - the harm done.
TBF the current CMA is the worst of both worlds, its a flowery catch all with no teeth, some of the things you can cover with it, if done in the physical world would net you life, wheras CMA only has a 10 yr maximum.
So theres a lot to be said for obsoleting it and writing something that has sensible penalties and sensible Caveats for legitimate non-nefarious means.
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