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American businesses and consumers now face unprecedented threats to computer security. Those threats range from the annoying (online pranksters) to the potentially lethal (hostile nation-states). To aid in the fight against these threats, Congress is currently considering amendments to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the principal federal law that criminalizes and punishes computer intrusions. In this paper, Jonathan Keim describes contemporary threats to computing security, explains the structure of the CFAA, and discusses several ways that Congress could improve the CFAA while retaining its usefulness for deterring and punishing computer intrusions.
