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Begin forwarded message:

Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 15:46:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Internet Defense League <info AT fightforthefuture.org>
To: discipline AT gmx.net
Subject: Cat Signal!


Dear IDL members,





We need to beat back a bad proposal to expand the Computer Fraud and Abuse 
Act (CFAA) -- in a hurry.  So we're asking the Internet Defense League to 
snap into action on Monday and Tuesday of next week.  (April 8th and 9th.) 



Our friends at Demand Progress have created code for an embeddable 
contact-Congress widget. Read more and grab the code here. Internet Defense 
League code will be available soon: 



http://www.fixthecfaa.com/ [ http://www.fixthecfaa.com/ ]

 [ http://www.fixthecfaa.com/ ] 

You'll be joining Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, EFF, Boing Boing, 
Reddit, and other great groups and sites as we stand together against this 
awful proposal. 



As many of you probably know, our friend (and friend to many of you) Aaron 
Swartz committed suicide earlier this year, while he was being prosecuted for 
downloading too many academic articles from the JSTOR cataloguing site.  
Prosecutors were hanging four decades in prison over his head! 



Aaron was charged under the CFAA, a law that passed in the mid-80s, before 
more than a handful of Americans even had personal computers -- let alone 
Internet access. 



Yet law enforcement interprets this statute so broadly that it claims it 
criminalizes all sorts of mundane Internet use: potentially even breaking a 
website's fine print terms of service agreement.  Don't set up a Myspace page 
for your cat.  Don't fudge your height on a dating site.  Don't share your 
Facebook password with anybody, ever.  You could be committing a federal 
crime. 



We've been pushing to change this, and have made some progress: Reps and 
Senators are pulling together a proposal called "Aaron's Law". 



But... then last week members of the House Judiciary Committee floated an 
audacious proposal that would actually expand and harshen certain parts of 
the CFAA.  Think of it as the opposite of Aaron's Law.  And we're hearing 
that it could come up for a vote as soon as next week. 



We need your helping beating back this awful proposal and to build momentum 
for Aaron's Law. 



Please click here to read more and grab Demand Progress' code for our 
embeddable widgets (IDL code coming soon): 



http://www.fixthecfaa.com/ [ http://www.fixthecfaa.com/ ]

 [ http://www.fixthecfaa.com/ ] 

Reforming the CFAA is a real chance for the US Congress to make laws 
governing the Internet better and fairer.  And it's a chance for the 
coalition that came together around SOPA to actually pass positive reform.  
If all of us take action next week, it won't just kill a bad bill, it will 
help us build real momentum to passing positive change in the wake of Aaron's 
death. 



Thanks! 

Holmes Wilson 

Internet Defense League


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The only cure to the evils of Democracy is more Democracy.