You may have heard about the recent high-profile, malicious hack of Target‘s point of sale systems, giving the attackers access to the details of at least 40 million credit cards. Senator Patrick Leahy is, incredibly cynically, using this news event to try to sneak through a change to the „anti-hacking“ law, the CFAA, which was used to prosecute Aaron Swartz and many others. And it‘s not a change to improve that law, but to broaden it, extending massively how the DOJ can charge just about anyone they want with serious computer crimes.