The Supreme Court docket will lastly rule on controversial US hacking regulation

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, back, and Stephen Breyer, right, seemed skeptical of the government's broad reading of the CFAA. Justice Thomas, center, seemed more sympathetic to the government's view. Chief Justice Roberts, left, kept his cards close to his chest.

Enlarge / Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, again, and Stephen Breyer, proper, appeared skeptical of the federal government’s broad studying of the CFAA. Justice Thomas, middle, appeared extra sympathetic to the federal government’s view. Chief Justice Roberts, left, stored his playing cards near his chest. (credit score: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg through Getty Photographs)

The Supreme Court docket on Monday thought-about how broadly to interpret the Laptop Fraud and Abuse Act, America’s fundamental anti-hacking statute.

This is how I described the case again in September:

The case arose after a Georgia police officer named Nathan Van Buren was caught taking a bribe to lookup confidential data in a police database. The person paying the bribe had met a lady at a strip membership and wished to substantiate that she was not an undercover cop earlier than pursuing a sexual—and presumably industrial—relationship along with her.

Sadly for Van Buren, the opposite man was working with the FBI, which arrested Van Buren and charged him with a violation of the CFAA. The CFAA prohibits gaining unauthorized entry to a pc system—in different phrases, hacking—but additionally prohibits “exceeding approved entry” to acquire knowledge. Prosecutors argued that Van Buren “exceeded approved entry” when he appeared up details about the lady from the strip membership.

However legal professionals for Van Buren disputed that. They argued that his police login credentials approved him to entry any knowledge within the database. Providing confidential data in alternate for a bribe might have been opposite to division coverage and state regulation, they argued, however it did not “exceed approved entry” so far as the CFAA goes.

Clearly, nobody goes to defend a cop allegedly accepting bribes to disclose confidential authorities data. However the case issues as a result of the CFAA has been invoked in prosecutions of extra sympathetic defendants. For instance, prosecutors used the CFAA to prosecute Aaron Swartz for scraping tutorial papers from the JSTOR database. Additionally they prosecuted a small firm that used automated scraping software program to buy and resell blocks of tickets from the TicketMaster web site.

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