Your Online Dating Lies Could Land You in Jail

No one pays attention to the dumb "Terms of Service" on most websites, but the White House is pushing to make them legally binding. That would outlaw providing "any false personal information" on Facebook (did you really watch Inside Job?). It would criminalize Googling before you can sign a binding contract (looking at you, 17-year-old honors-class delinquents). And it would make illegal any "inaccurate, misleading, or false information" on your Match.com profile.

Indeed, the whole point of the Obama administration's push to expand the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act seems to be to criminalize what everyone does online so Americans can be prosecuted at will.

As the Justice Department's Richard Downing put it in prepared testimony, scaling back "prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service... would make it difficult or impossible to deter and address serious insider threats through prosecution." Making it harder to prosecute will make it harder to prosecute, in other words. And prosecutors like it easy: Unable to otherwise prosecute evil mom Lori Drew for bullying a 13 year-old via MySpace, the Feds nailed her for violating the social network's terms of service (until that conviction was overturned). What if they could just do that to everybody? They'd love the leverage, surely.

Former DOJ computer crimes prosecutor Orin Kerr's opposing testimony is great. He writes, "perhaps [a website's] Terms of Use will declare that only registered Democrats can visit the website; or only people who have been to Alaska; or only people named 'Frank.' Under the Justice Department's interpretation of the statute, all of these Terms of Use can be criminally enforced."

The ACLU and Electronic Freedom Foundation are also opposed to this broad interpretation of CFAA. Obviously, the expanded law has desecrates civil liberties in the name of security, to a grotesque extent. The U.S. Congress would never allow anything like that, right? (Ahem.)

Your Online Dating Lies Could Land You in Jail