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Comment by rprasad | Hacker News Reader

This petition is guranteed to fail. The domain of writing, passing, and modifying laws is the domain of Congress, not the President. You can pester the President all you want, but it is not within his Constitutional powers to do anything about the law. (Indeed, even announcing that the DOJ should not enforce the law is a potentially impeachable offense depending on the political environment.)

If you want the CFAA reformed, call, write, and/or meet with your Congressional Rep and Senator and tell them what you think of the law.

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It's a useful vehicle for starting the process, bringing attention to the issue, clearly explaining what and why, providing a single point of action for people to focus on, and gauging support.

If all that goes well and the petition gets enough signatures and visibility, then that's a good point to segue off into the more difficult organizational problem of getting all those people to actually call their rep.

Additionally, the President has to sign such a law eventually anyway, so starting movements with a plea to the President has some benefit in that regard as well.

How is it that every single post you make has some inaccuracy?

Right now, Obama is considering executive orders to change gun laws. If he wanted to issue an executive order about the CFAA, or instruct DOJ not to enforce it, or push Congress to do something, he sure could move the needle.

The petition is all about bringing attention to the matter.

EDIT: See? Every comment you make is so clearly wrong (no one outside HN cares, federal prosecutors have no discretion, seeing Ortiz disciplined would be a "fantasy") that it is falsified in realtime.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/zoe-lofgren-aarons-...

  WASHINGTON -- Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) took to the 
  online forum Aaron Swartz helped found on Tuesday night to 
  propose legislation honoring the late Internet activist.

  "I'm Rep. Zoe Lofgren & I'm introducing 'Aaron's Law' to 
  change the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," Lofgren wrote in 
  a Reddit post. Swartz, 26, committed suicide on Friday.

I love how this is being downvoted not by people who are upset at the inaccuracy of what you posted but rather out of either ignorance of how our country's government is designed to work, or those who are angry for some reason and take it out on your poor, little downvote arrow. What you've said is 100% true and starting/signing a petition such is this is the very epitome of slactivism. As @nhebb here said recently, " Slacktivism is like leveling up in a video game. It gives you the sense of accomplishment, even though you haven't done jack shit in real life."

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