Expand / Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch{} , also Stephen Breyer, directly, appeared skeptical of their government’s broad understanding of the CFAA. Justice Thomas, centre, looked more conducive to the government’s opinion. Chief Justice Roberts, abandoned, kept his cards near his chest. (charge: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg through Getty Images)
Here is the way I explained the situation back in September:
The situation arose following a Georgia police officer called Nathan Van Buren was caught taking a bribe to appear confidential data in a police record. The guy paying the bribe’d met a girl in a strip club and also wished to affirm that she wasn’t an undercover cop prior to following an sexual–and ironically commercial–connection with her.
Unfortunately for Van Buren, another guy was operating together with the FBI, which detained Van Buren and charged him with a violation of the CFAA. Prosecutors contended that Van Buren”exceeded authorized access” if he looked up info regarding the girl from the strip bar.
But attorneys for Van Buren contested. They contended that his authorities login credentials allowed him to get any information in the database. Offering confidential data in exchange for a bribe might have been against department policy and state legislation, they contended, but it did not”exceed authorized access” up to the CFAA goes.
Evidently, nobody will shield a cop allegedly accepting bribes to disclose confidential government data. However, the situation matters since the CFAA was invoked in prosecutions of much more sympathetic defendants. As an instance, prosecutors employed the CFAA into prosecute Aaron Swartz for scratching academic documents in the JSTOR database. In addition they prosecutied a little business that used automatic scraping applications to buy and store blocks of tickets in the TicketMaster site.
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