Whitehat hackers have backed an ambitious White House petition, put together by a noted legal expert, calling for reform of both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Their claim is that both statutes have stopped them doing their day job properly, preventing proper research into widely deployed and critical technologies.
Rapid7 researcher Jay Radcliffe tells me he was deterred from thorough research into insulin pumps because he was afraid the manufacturers’ armies of lawyers might have sued him using the DMCA. Understandably, Radcliffe, a diabetic who famously hacked the model of pump that fed his own body insulin back in 2011, doesn’t want to go to prison for trying to ensure medical devices are safe from malicious hackers…
