DOJ: Lying on Match.com needs to be a crime
The U.S. Department of Justice is defending computer hacking laws that make it a crime to use a fake name on Facebook or lie about your weight in an online dating profile. — In a statement obtained by CNET that's scheduled to be delivered tomorrow …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Justice Department's statement, set for delivery tomorrow before lawmakers weighing changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, doubles down on an expansive reading of hacking law: violating a site's terms of service — a fake name on Facebook, a padded Match.com profile — can itself be a federal crime. It lands amid a week when the tension between online identity rules and real people was already on display: Facebook demanded passport proof from Salman Rushdie and renamed him Ahmed Rushdie, while an exploit hijacked accounts to post gore and pornography.
The position also arrives as Washington and Silicon Valley are already squared off over internet law — Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Mozilla and AOL have publicly opposed SOPA — and after prosecutors used Facebook records in the January case built around nude e-mail photos, showing how readily platform data feeds investigations.
First-order effects
- Every Facebook and Match.com user who has bent the truth on a profile becomes potentially exposed under the CFAA, with prosecutors treating terms-of-service breaches as unauthorized access rather than contract disputes.
- Facebook and Match.com gain a federal backstop for their identity policies — the same real-name enforcement that caught Salman Rushdie this week now sits atop potential criminal liability.
Second-order effects
- The companies lobbying against SOPA face an awkward split: they are fighting expanded government power over the internet in one forum while the DOJ argues their own user agreements should carry criminal force in another, sharpening the industry's push for CFAA amendments.
- Dating and social platforms get pricing and policy leverage — stricter verification requirements become defensible as compliance measures rather than user-hostile friction.
Third-order effects
- If TOS violations remain criminally prosecutable, the long-run endpoint is formalized identity verification online — platforms evolving toward proof-of-personhood systems because pseudonymity carries legal risk for users, not just moderation headaches for sites.
- Criminal law displaces civil contract as the enforcement mechanism for online conduct, shifting power from courts adjudicating disputes between sites and users to prosecutors deciding which profile lies merit charges.
The trend: Computer crime law is being stretched from hacking into everyday terms-of-service violations, pushing the web toward verified real identities and making prosecutors arbiters of online speech and self-presentation.