{"id":200229,"date":"2021-06-03T18:37:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-03T23:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/06\/03\/a-little-late-aaron-schwartz-is-dead\/"},"modified":"2021-06-03T18:37:00","modified_gmt":"2021-06-03T23:37:00","slug":"a-little-late-aaron-schwartz-is-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/06\/03\/a-little-late-aaron-schwartz-is-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"A Little Late, Aaron Schwartz is Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court has finally shot down the overbroad interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that was used to prosecute Aaron Schwartz to death<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I’d say, “About f%$#ing time,” but it’s at least 7 years too late: <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n

The Supreme Court\u2019s decision<\/a> on Thursday in Van Buren v. United States<\/i><\/a> provides the court\u2019s first serious look at one of the most important criminal statutes involving computer-related crime, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Justice Amy Coney Barrett\u2019s opinion for a majority 0f six firmly rejected the broad reading of that statute that the Department of Justice has pressed in recent years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Among other things, the CFAA criminalizes conduct that \u201cexceeds authorized access\u201d of a computer. Crucially, the statute defines that term as meaning \u201cto access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain \u2026 information \u2026 that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain.\u201d The question in Van Buren<\/i> was whether users violate that statute by accessing information for improper purposes or instead whether users violate the statute only if they access information they were not entitled to obtain. In this case, for example, a Georgia police officer named Nathan Van Buren took a bribe to run a license-plate check. He was entitled to run license-plate checks, but not for illicit purposes. The lower courts upheld a conviction under the CFAA (because he was not entitled to check license-plate records for private purposes). The Supreme Court disagreed, adopting the narrower reading of the CFAA, under which it is a crime only if users access information they were not entitled to obtain.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To be clear: Van Buren should be in jail for a very long time, but his crime is violation of people’s civil rights, abuse of power, and taking bribes, not computer hacking.<\/p>\n

And Amy Coney Barret gets to the heart of the matter, that the government’s position would literally make tens of millions of people unwitting felons:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Finally, Barrett turns to a topic that dominated the amicus filings and much of the time at oral argument<\/a>: the \u201cbreathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity\u201d that the Government\u2019s reading would criminalize. For Barrett, that reality \u201cunderscores the implausibility of the Government\u2019s interpretation,\u201d which provides (in words Justice Elena Kagan coined in an earlier case) \u201cextra icing on a cake already frosted.\u201d Barrett notes that extending the statute to \u201cevery violation of a computer-use policy\u201d would make criminals of \u201cmillions of otherwise law-abiding citizens,\u201d offering examples of such trivial conduct as \u201cembellishing on online-dating profile\u201d and \u201cusing a pseudonym on Facebook\u201d \u2013 activities that violate website use restrictions and thus would fall within the government\u2019s understanding of the CFAA.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If there is a lesson from all of this, it is that prosecutors will take the most outrageous and extreme view of any criminal statue that they come across.<\/p>\n

There needs to be some serious reform here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court has finally shot down the overbroad interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that was used to prosecute Aaron Schwartz to death. I’d say, “About f%$#ing time,” but it’s at least 7 years too late:  The Supreme Court\u2019s decision on Thursday in Van Buren v. United States provides the court\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[971,1060,1278,972,1041],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-computer","category-fraud","category-justice","category-law-enforcement-misconduct"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200229"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}