'Hacking' To Be Declared Illegal
Programmer's Rights
10/25/2000; 9:19:54 AM

This is slashdot article about the international cybercrime treaty, as mentioned before here.  I'm posting this because I think it's a good bet there will be some insightful comments posted there. Browse with "Highest Scores First".

Whatever else you can say about the theory, I think it's quite clear that some bureaucrats who got delusions of grandeur into their heads, started writing legislation, and just ignored all technical input they receieved because they thought they knew better. I can't find a link, but I seem to recall some recent study showing that one's claimed knowlege on a subject is almost perfectly inversely proportional to actual knowlege.  Unfortunately, this means a lot of bureaucrats think they know everything there is to know about computers and they can just start legislating.