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Some laws act like hidden trapdoors. Everyone crosses the trap at least once, but only a handful actually fall into it. For the wealthy, it is a law that prohibits insider trading. For the rest of us folk, it’s the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
On Thursday, federal law enforcement arrested journalist Tim Burke and arraigned him in handcuffs in court. Twelve of the 14 charges leveled against him in a subsequently unsealed indictment are based on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the federal government’s anti-hacking law.
The story begins in 2022 with an extremely haunted interview with Kanye West by Tucker Carlson. Most interviews have been edited for clarity. In this case, the interview was cut to eliminate the rambling anti-Semitic rants.Unaired clips and other videos Deputy And Media Matters was offered through Burke, which was downloaded from LiveU, a streaming service used by media companies to share video files. The FBI searched Burke’s home last year and seized his cell phone, laptop, hard drive and notes.
This indictment is a shocking example of how the CFAA tortures the English language. It accused Burke of “repeatedly exploiting” him.[ing] Compromised credentials can be used to gain unauthorized access to a victim entity’s protected computer. ” Burke and his lawyers discovered the video clip after using demo login credentials that had been posted publicly on the internet, and argued that the files may have been shared via an insecure public URL. .
If so, it probably wasn’t the ideal IT setup for the media that was using LiveU. In fact, they may have objected very strongly to strangers having access to their outtakes. However, does that alone constitute “unauthorized access”? Should it be?
For a long time, it was unclear whether violating a website’s terms of service could be a felony.
The strange world of CFAA prosecutions is rich and diverse because the CFAA is so easy to weaponize. This law relies on “unauthorized” or “exceeding authorization” access. There is no specific definition of what constitutes a “protected computer.” (A better question might be: What is an unprotected computer?) For a long time, it was ambiguous whether violating a website’s terms of service was a felony punishable by prison time. 2021 Supreme Court Decision Van Buren vs. United States Now that you’ve narrowed down the CFAA enough, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. (Shortly after, Netflix began cracking down on password sharing, which inadvertently upset the timing.) and Everyone started getting angry that AI companies were scraping websites against the wishes of their operators. )
Since Mr. Burke is a journalist, the first thing that comes to mind would be the lawsuit against journalist Matthew Keyes. He was convicted in 2015 of posting credentials for his former employer’s content management system in a public chat room and encouraging others to deface the website. Mr. Keyes, whose actions resembled neither hacking nor journalism, was charged under the CFAA’s provisions prohibiting “unauthorized harm.” Although this is a separate section of the Act, the same thorny question of the meaning of “authorization” comes up again.
But Burke’s case is similar to that of the much-deplored and admired Aaron Swartz (sometimes referred to as “The Boy of the Internet”) and the much-deplored and less-admired Andrew “Weave” Auernheimer. The case is much more similar to that of Mr. Both men were famously charged under the CFAA for collecting readily available information.
Mr. Auernheimer’s conviction unfortunately stemmed from a script that automatically accessed a series of public URLs containing AT&T customer information. Swartz was charged with scraping JSTOR, a paywalled academic database freely accessible on MIT’s campus network. In theory, when he signed into the network as Gary Host (G. Host, or Ghost), his access would become “beyond authorized,” and then campus IT would overload the servers for his requests. It happened when I spoofed the DNS after trying to block the computer for.
Swartz and Auernheimer are not known as journalists, but both work in media publications.Swartz was a contributing editor for a left-wing magazine. The BafflerAnd Auernheimer occasionally writes for The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website that he helped technically manage. Their respective charges speak to that aspect of their personality. Swartz scraped his JSTOR in hopes of liberating the entire world’s scholarship. Although Mr. Auernheimer did not write any of the code for which he was imprisoned, his love of attention led him to serve as the official spokesperson for the AT&T breach.
Auernheimer’s conviction was overturned by an appeals court in 2014 on technical issues. Swartz died in 2013, so the case never went to trial. Aaron’s Law, a CFAA reform bill, was proposed in response to his suicide, but stalled in Congress.
If these two were written into a novel, their characters would be ridiculed as vile symbols of the noble and base instincts that drive journalism. As things stand, it is perhaps shocking that journalists are not consistently prosecuted. Defining “accreditation” loosely will, of course, ultimately lead journalists into a corner. Modern journalism is the act of using a computer in a way that someone, somewhere, would actually be better off not using it.
The case against Tim Burke is almost a bizarre historical throwback. People on all sides, from the Legislature to the courts and even the Justice Department, seem to recognize that there is something wrong with the CFAA. This is a law that can be crafted to fit a dizzying variety of scenarios to defeat progressive idealists and literal neo-Nazis with equal potency. And here we are again squinting at his website and asking, “Is this a protected computer?”
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