The third road I envision is that the law is thrown out. It seems a possibility that they could use this law as the basis for prosecuting some major piracy or spamming entity. With good enough lawyers it seems to me one could prove that the wording of the law is too broad to be applicable. That to apply the law at all means that everyone, including the state governments themselves, would be guilty of breaking it by virtue of using firewalls or NAT. It could be appealed up to the State Supreme Court and thrown out- sending the state legislature back to the drawing board.
I don’t necessarily believe the conspiracy theorists who think that the law is intentionally written to allow Big Brother to monitor our every move and control our actions on the Internet. I do think that many of the members of the state governments don’t truly understand enough about how any of this technology works to grasp the implications of how this could be mis-interpreted.
The entertainment industry has lobbied (See Article)to make it legal for them to hack into computers housing pirated works and delete the files themselves so I don’t trust their motives. I have this idealistic view that our representatives in government should represent their constituents and not the lobbyists with the most money and the loudest voice.
For this to work for the purpose for which it was seemingly intended, I think the politicians need to involve more techie people from the industry. They need to ensure they get input from experts on encryption, network security, firewalls, digital rights management, etc. and enlist their help in drafting wording that achieves the goal without leaving the door so open for abuse and mis-interpretation. In the meantime, in the states where this has already been enacted, it remains to be seen how the law will be applied and how it will stand up in court.
