THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: Poisoning The Hamburger Helper.

Take a look at the website where Justice maintains a representative list of its most significant prosecutions. What’s striking is how few prosecutions it has to brag about – less than 50 – and how few of those (maybe half) represent cases in which we actually caught the kind of remote hackers we’re most threatened by. I’m willing to bet that there is no other federal criminal law that has been amended so often in prosecutors’ favor with so few successful prosecutions to show for it.

The latest amendments are more of the same: Shooting in the dark with a bigger gun. As protections against cyberattack, these amendments are useless. They are added to the administration’s package mainly to give it the appearance of heft.

They are the legislative equivalent of Hamburger Helper.

Actually, they’re worse than that. The RICO provision is far more dangerous than it first appears.

To be fair, the same can be true of Hamburger Helper. . . .