More than 120 people attended a roundtable discussion on the legal implications of cybercrime on Monday, March 4, in Kane Hall.

The event was put on by the Department of Communication’s new debate program, whose goal is to build and foster a culture of speech and debate on campus.

The discussion centered on redefining “cybercrime” after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a well-known hacker and political activist who ended his life in the midst of an intensive investigation launched by the CIA. Swartz was being heavily pursued after he downloaded the entirety of JSTOR, a digital archive of thousands of academic articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After being caught, Swartz was charged with 13 counts of felony hacking and wire fraud under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law written in 1984 to govern cases where U.S. government computers or those of certain financial institutions are involved.

In the wake of Swartz’s suicide, proponents have stepped forward to promote Aaron’s Law, a bill that would exclude terms of service violations from the CFAA to help prevent what happened to Swartz from happening to other internet users.

Marcia Hofmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international nonprofit digital rights group based in San Francisco, agreed that the CFAA needs reforming.

“We should raise felony triggers so that more offenses are misdemeanors,” not automatic felonies, she said.

Brian Rowe, an adjunct professor at the University of Washington’s School of Information, shared what he believes to be one of the largest issues at the crossroads of technology and law today: We’ve taken property laws and have tried to apply them to information, but they’re just not equal things.

“When I eat an apple,” he explained,  “you also cannot eat it. It’s fundamentally rivalrous. The value of that apple falls. With regards to a piece of information, though, the more people that listen to it and the more people that have access to it, the more valuable it is.”

Rowe spoke about the growing disconnect between the norms of digital, online citizens and laws designed to control more traditional print media.

“What we’ve created,” he said, “is a situation that whether you’re forwarding emails, or remixing things or sharing things, whether it’s academic or whether it’s cultural, everything potentially has these penalties (of being sued for damages, liable for copyright infringement, etc).”

Ryan Calo of the University of Washington School of Law, who moderated the discussion, asked Hofmann and Rowe whether they believe that some anti-hacking laws need to be in place. They both conceded yes.

“There should be laws against harmful hacking,” Hofmann said, “but currently those laws are just too arbitrary.”

The event was free and open to the public.

The UW Debate Union is focused on providing students and university affiliates with long-term exposure to debate.

Matt McGarrity, Director of Debate within the Department of Communication, explained that creating a culture of debate on campus means looking for ways to engage outside of the typical quarter-long class experience.

“If somebody doesn’t have time to take a 10-week class, I don’t want that to be a barrier to entry. We’ll have multiple opportunities to engage,” he said.

Roundtable discussions, such as this one on cybercrime, are a way to give repeated exposure to debate outside of the classroom.

Stay tuned through the Department of Communication’s website for more UW Debate Union events in the future.

By ALYSSA KEEHN
UW News Lab

Watch the video from the event below.