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Saturday, August 10, 2002
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/08/05/020805hndefconpolitics.xml Def Con: Politics plays larger role this year Sam Costello Just after last year's Def Con ended, U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrested a Russian programmer who had presented a paper at the conference on weaknesses in the encryption of Adobe Systems e-books. With that arrest, Dmitry Sklyarov became the first person to face criminal prosecution under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that is coming under increasingly heavy fire from hackers, civil rights advocates, cyber rights groups, among others. While the prosecution of Sklyarov eventually shifted to a prosecution of his employer, Moscow-based Elcomsoft, discussion at this year's Def Con increasingly shifted to politics. Along with the DMCA, a series of post-Sept. 11 laws and proposed laws threaten to realign the landscape that hackers and other technology enthusiasts play on: The already-passed Patriot Act, which increased government cyber-surveillance powers; the proposed Cybersecurity Enhancement Act, which would lengthen jail time for hackers and would even allow for life imprisonment in some cases; the proposed "hack back" law, which would allow copyright owners to hack into and disable file trading networks if they thought their works were being traded on them....
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