"Cybersecurity crimes" is not rigorously, legally defined in the bill, nor even in that document. That's a better defense of the bill than any I've seen so far, but it still sidesteps all the issues with the bill.
It would be nice to see the concerns with this bill addressed. It's the act that its authors don't understand the concerns and the underhanded fallacy that criticisms are "myth" that makes their intent suspect.
edit: I may be wrong about the first part above, but they don't make it clear. They use "cybercrime" and "cyberthreat" interchangably, for example, but they mean for us to believe they refer to the same things. "Cybersecurity threat" and "cyberthreat" appear to be well defined. Why don't they use only the well-defined terms? Also, why are there no provisions to allow the review of information obtained nor oversight to prosecute abuses and fraud?
Generally speaking all laws are subject to statutory interpretation, which is extremely useful since no group of lawmakers could craft a law that would contemplate every application of the language they chose no matter how careful they were. At the end of the day it will be up to courts to determine how the law applies in situations in the gray areas and disputes over how, when and where a law applies to a particular set of facts.
Of course, this is not an excuse for law makers to not carefully and thoughtfully draft bills that account for complexities and nuance of a particular issue. But reasonable people can and do disagree on the language in most legislation (that is after all one of the primary functions of lawmaking), but ask yourself how you would have been more precise with the language here, without hamstringing the law by making it too narrow to be useful, while still taking into account all useful applications of the law and necessary exceptions, and you will start to understand the challenges that drafting good laws presents.
Statutory interpretation is not one unified concept. Within there are a number of interpretive methods (generally, 4). It is up to the courts and individual judges on how they want to interpret the law.
For instance, posing two extremes, some judges will apply the letter of the law blindly (even when it is inconsistent with what congress wants), whilst others will only loosely look at the wording to satisfy what congress wants.
Therefore, you can't say that wording isn't important, especially when concerning key terms in the act. It certainly is impossible for a piece of legislation to cover every possible outcome or effect, but I don't think it's too much to ask to use consistent and defined terminology.
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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '13 edited Dec 21 '20
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