Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has a new piece out on cybersecurity, online vigilantism, and white hat hacking. It explores the many avenues for countering bad actors in the online environment, and draws a line between reaching out to aggress against them and using deception and guile to confound and frustrate them.
The piece is apparently motivated by the the “Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act,” introduced a couple of years ago, which would have given the music industry immunity from liability for accessing peer-to-peer networks and attempting to prevent trade in their copyrighted material. Crews says “the industry is bound to try again.” His conclusion: “Explicit liability protection for particular classes of white hat hacking is ill advised. . . . A green light for hacking can work against broader cybersecurity and intellectual property goals, and there are alternatives.”
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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