Can The U.S. Criminalize Lying on the Internet Under the new CFAA Amendment? – Yes we can!.
Imagine this scenario: You are running a business and want to add a ‘fictional’ person to your social media sites in an effort to improve engagement. So you create this fictional person, put up a bogus picture, and post positive reviews about your business in an effort to spark conversations. Next thing you know, the Department of Justice is banging at your door. Seem unreal? Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), an amendment to the Counterfeit Access Device and Abuse Act generally used to prosecute hacking and other serious cyber-crime, you would be breaking the law.
In fact, under the CFAA amendment, you could be breaking the law if you’re caught doing the following:
- Using the Google Search Engine if you’re under the age of 18
- Using a fake name on Facebook
- Lie about your weight on your match.com profile
The DOJ’s deputy computer crime chief, Richard Downing, states that law enforcement needs the amendment in order to prosecute individuals for identity theft, privacy invasion or the misuse of government databases, and other violations of the law.
An alternative suggestion is that this CFAA amendment is designed to attack alternative media.”The existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be,” Obama’s administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, wrote in a paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures.” Sunstein proposed infiltrating “extremist groups” – the alternative media – that deviate from the official narrative on 9/11 and other government-spun fairy tales.
Modifying the CFAA could appear to be an attempt silence government critics and journalists who “lie” about 9/11 and other official narratives.