>If they can't even manage to fix these terrible, obvious mistakes of the past, what hope for arcane computer laws?
I don't think the things preventing the fixing of past mistakes actually stand in the way of fixing computer crime laws. The CFAA is bad because it was poorly drafted originally and is now fairly anachronistic. There is no huge lobby for putting a dozen hackers in jail for decades. It doesn't happen at scale. There is no big money in it. Setting the penalties to something less draconian would not cost powerful people anything of significant value.
The drug laws are bad because they were designed to be bad. Their lobbyists are prisons who want more prisoners on a mass scale and law enforcement agencies who want bigger budgets and to seize the assets of rich criminals for themselves. To fix them you have to take on the whole system.
I am not advocating that we should not try to fix the drug laws. We certainly should. But they're not the low hanging fruit. It's worth doing what's easy immediately while we figure out a long-term plan to do what's hard.
I don't think the things preventing the fixing of past mistakes actually stand in the way of fixing computer crime laws. The CFAA is bad because it was poorly drafted originally and is now fairly anachronistic. There is no huge lobby for putting a dozen hackers in jail for decades. It doesn't happen at scale. There is no big money in it. Setting the penalties to something less draconian would not cost powerful people anything of significant value.
The drug laws are bad because they were designed to be bad. Their lobbyists are prisons who want more prisoners on a mass scale and law enforcement agencies who want bigger budgets and to seize the assets of rich criminals for themselves. To fix them you have to take on the whole system.
I am not advocating that we should not try to fix the drug laws. We certainly should. But they're not the low hanging fruit. It's worth doing what's easy immediately while we figure out a long-term plan to do what's hard.