Why Current Botnet Takedown Jurisprudence Should Not Be Replicated

On June 17, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators reintroduced the International Cybercrime Prevention Act. If passed, this bill would grant federal prosecutors access to new tools in their fight against cybercrime. A section of the legislation would expand the government’s legal arsenal against global networks of compromised computers called botnets. Such botnets infect millions of global computers and “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, hijacking them to participate in “distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, proxy and spam services, malware distribution, and other organized criminal activity” not to mention “covert intelligence collection” or attacks on “Internet-connected critical infrastructure.”

One rationale behind this bill is that while the U.S. is suffering from “a s

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