For weeks, President Barack Obama has been pushing a set of controversial cybersecurity proposals. He prominently mentioned the plans during his State of the Union address, stressing the need for legislation, using that classic political pretext for demolishing civil liberties, protecting children.

“No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids,” he said during the speech, dutifully ignoring the elephant in the room: the U.S. government’s role in doing much of the same.

But Obama’s proposals are a mixed bag of old and dangerous ideas. He wants to create information-sharing regimes between private companies and the government to detect threats as well as expand the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the draconian anti-hacking law that the government used to prosecute the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz. Both steps would not only be ineffective at improving cybersecurity in any practical sense but also further empower the government to go after activists and journalists such as Barrett Brown, who was sentenced Thursday to 63 months in prison.

Brown’s sentencing (which came after more than two years of imprisonment, vigorous prosecution and unjustified solitary confinement) is just a chilling prelude if Congress succeeds in expanding the CFAA. Before his arrest, Brown and his crowdsourced research initiative ProjectPM were investigating the underbelly of the military intelligence complex, mapping ties between the U.S. surveillance state and shadowy private corporations such as Mantech and Booz Allen Hamilton — the very world from which National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden emerged.

The U.S. government dedicated a disturbing amount of effort to ensuring Brown’s conviction. His charges (which later regrettably included publishing a threatening YouTube video rant against an FBI agent who seized his computer) originally carried sentences totaling more than 100 years in prison. The prosecution saw to it that Brown was gagged from speaking about the case and that large portions of the case’s court documents remained under seal. The government also tried to go after Brown’s contributors and even attempted to freeze donations made to his legal defense fund.

The charges revolved around a simple act: copying and pasting a hyperlink into a chat room. The link led to publicly available files stolen by the hacktivist collective Anonymous from the U.S. intelligence contractor Stratfor — part of a breach that revealed, among other things, surveillance of political activists around the world and efforts to discredit journalists such as Glenn Greenwald. Prosecutors alleged Brown posted the link knowing the file contained credit card information, even though chat logs suggested he had no intention to commit fraud and may have not known what was in it.