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What do these sections of the bill do?
Amend the Computer Misuse Act 1990 to: - increase
the maximum sentence for the offence of 'unauthorised access to
computer material' from 6 months imprisonment to 2 years imprisonment,
- replace
the offence of 'unauthorised modification of computer material' with a
new offence of 'unauthorised acts with intent to impair the operation
of computer, etc', increasing the maximum sentence for 5 years to 10
years, and
- introduce a new offence of
'Making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in computer misuse
offences' with a maximum sentence of 2 years imprisonment.
Why are these changes being brought forward? The
Computer Misuse Act 1990 was introduced as a Private Member's bill, by
Conservative MP Michael Colvin, following the decision in the Court of
Appeal in the case of Regina vs Gold (1998). The
case in question related to an incident in 1984, when Robert Schifreen
and Stephen Gold gained unauthorised access to, amongst other things, a
PRESTEL Viewdata mailbox belonging to the Duke of Edinburgh. Schifreen
and Gold were prosecuted and, initially, convicted under section 1 of
the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act before being acquitted on appeal,
with the Court of Appeal ruling that the Act did not apply to their
actions. The Computer Misuse Act 1990 was
widely derided, at the time, as a knee-jerk reaction to this incident
but remains, today, the only statute covering matters such as computer
hacking. The fact that this bill arose out
of the hacking of BT's PRESTEL system should be sufficient to outline
the main problem with the Computer Misuse Act. It long pre-dates the
growth and development of the Internet and is now woefully out of date
and unfit for the purpose. An attempt to
update the Computer Misuse Act was made in 2004, sponsored by the All
Party Internet Group, which would have explicitly outlawed denial of
service attacks; one area in which the present law is seriously
deficient, but this failed when Parliament was prorogued. |