(via CBS SF Bay Area)

Stanford CIS’s Jennifer Granick keynote speech from the annual Black Hat computer security conference is spotlighted in thIs CBS Local story in which she declares overregulation is slowly killing the open Internet. 

The dream of a free and open Internet is slowly being killed by overregulation, censorship and bad laws that don’t stop the right people, a top computer crime defense lawyer says.

The annual Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas kicked off Wednesday with a keynote address from Jennifer Granick, director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Granick said that while the Internet needs to be reasonably safe in order to be functional, it’s no longer the revolutionary place it was 20 years ago.

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Granick also railed against the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which carries sentences of up to 10 years in prison for a first-time offense. It does nothing to prosecute countries like China that launch state-sponsored attacks against the U.S. government and major companies, along with other dangerous hackers based overseas, she said. But, she added, it often hits small-time American hackers with unfairly harsh prison sentences.

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