Goodlatte Would Criminalize Spyware

No one will confuse Bob Goodlatte with Neo, Keanu Reeve’s character in “The Matrix” trilogy of films, but Roanoke’s Republican congressional representative is fighting his own real-world war against technology run amok. His Internet Spyware Prevention Act would finally criminalize unauthorized invasions of people’s computers.

If you have a computer connected to the Internet, odds are it has spyware on it. Software surreptitiously installed and designed to gather personal information resides on more than 90 percent of home computers, by some estimates.

Even the most persnickety computer geek can fall victim to the hidden software that arrives via Web sites and e-mail. Average Web surfers have little hope of blocking all of it or removing it once it has taken up residence on a hard drive.

Spyware can monitor where you point your browser, logs bank account numbers, searches for personal documents and reports it all back to the crooks who exploit such information for marketing or, worse, identity theft.

Some spyware even overrides browsers, directing people to fake Web sites designed to look authentic but which are only fronts to extract more information.

And right now, spyware is largely legal. If Goodlatte’s bill becomes law, that would change.

His bill would make maliciously installing spyware on someone’s computer a crime punishable by fines and up to five years in jail. It would also authorize $10 million for the Justice Department to fight spyware and other online scams.

Goodlatte draws an apt analogy, “Just as we would expect a burglar to face criminal charges for invading a home and stealing property, we should expect the same from people who break into our computers to gather personal information.”

Such protection is past due. Goodlatte’s bill passed the House in the last two sessions, but died in the Senate both times. It is advancing in the House again, and hopefully will fare better this year.

It won’t be a panacea. Crooks outside the United States would be largely beyond its reach, for example. It would, however, give some measure of legal defense against domestic abusers who would sneak into Americans’ computers to do harm.

(c) 2007 Roanoke Times & World News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.