Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

• Author: Peter J.G. Toren
• Position: Peter J.G. Toren is a partner with Weisbrod Matteis & Copley in Washington, D.C., where he helps individuals and companies protect their IP rights. He specializes in patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret cases and has tried dozens of cases in his career. Prior to joining Weisbrod, he was a federal prosecutor with the Computer Crime and...
• Pages: 44-49

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 9, Number 5 , a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2017 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This

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Computer

Fraud and

Abuse Act

By Peter J.G. Toren

Ronald Reagan was in his second term as president of the

United States. Out of Africa won the Academy Award

for best picture. The space shuttle Challenger exploded

just after launch from Cape Canaveral, killing all eight on

board. The New York Mets beat the Red Sox in the World

Series in seven games, extending to 86 years the last time the

Red Sox had won the World Series. President Obama was

in his second year of law school. And Congress enacted the

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) as an amendment to

an earlier computer fraud law1—before commercial e-mail

was available for the general public and prior to the advent

of text messaging and downloadable applications. Much has

changed in the last 30 years, but the CFAA remains the pri-

mary statute used to prosecute hackers.

The government has used the CFAA to prosecute individu-

als for classic hacking offenses, such as defendants who hack

into computers of government ofcials, universities, nancial

institutions, or commercial establishments in order to steal

condential government information, trade secrets, and credit

card numbers. The government has also used the CFAA to

obtain convictions of foreign nationals who conspired to

gain unauthorized access to protected computer networks in

the United States in order to obtain sensitive information for

the purpose of exporting that information to China, and to

indict ve members of the Chinese military for hacking into

U.S. companies and a labor union. However, the broad reach

of the CFAA has also permitted the government, with vary-

ing degrees of success, to go after defendants who don’t t

the classic denition of a hacker. For example, the govern-

ment prosecuted a defendant under the CFAA for using a

law enforcement database to acquire intimate details about

women that the defendant then shared on websites along

with his plans to butcher, rape, torture, and eat these women.2

It also obtained a conviction, which was subsequently