5 things to know about #Obama new #cybersecurity proposals

e Union, but the president touted new proposals ahead of the speech.

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BY LORENZO FRANCESCHI-BICCHIERAI

Hacking and cybersecurity really went mainstream in 2014, grabbing headlines almost every week.

In the year of the famous Internet vulnerability Heartbleed, the massive data breaches of Home Depot and J.P. Morgan, and the hack on Sony Pictures, President Barack Obama wants the government to get more involved in improving cybersecurity.

SEE ALSO: How the U.S. and UK are teaming up to fight cyber threats

US cybercrime laws being used to target security researchers

• Tom Brewster
• theguardian.com, Thursday 29 May 2014 11.09 EDT
• Jump to comments (17)

Industry experts are concerned that America's anti-hacking laws are being applied without proper discretion, leaving security researchers vulnerable to prosecution. Photograph: Epoxydude/fstop/Corbis

Some of the world’s best-known security researchers claim to have been threatened with indictment over their efforts to find vulnerabilities in internet infrastructure, amid fears American computer hacking laws are perversely making the web less safe to surf.

Many in the security industry have expressed grave concerns around the application of the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), complaining law enforcement and lawyers have wielded it aggressively at anyone looking for vulnerabilities in the internet, criminalising work that’s largely benign.

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If you call yourself a hacker, does that automatically imply you have criminal intent?

If you call yourself a hacker, does that automatically imply you have criminal intent? Although that’s clearly ludicrous, the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho decided that a self-described label of “hacker” is significant enough to be used as evidence for bad intentions. Furthermore, the Court decided that since the defendant called himself a hacker, that was evidence enough to allow for seizure, via the copying of a hard drive, even though the Court said that such copying “is a serious invasion of privacy.”

http://blogs.computerworld.com/cybercrime-and-hacking/23013/if-you-call-yourself-hacker-does-automatically-imply-you-have-criminal-intent