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What he did was despicable and a grotesque abuse of his position, but it had nothing to do with hacking. The prosecutors decided to charge him under the CFAA b
by babypuncher 5y ago
What he did was despicable and a grotesque abuse of his position, but it had nothing to do with hacking.
The prosecutors decided to charge him under the CFAA because the data he sold for money was stored in a computer system. Van Buren accessed data he was authorized to access, using his own perfectly valid credentials. Because of this, the Supreme Court says it is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse act. They say that a person cannot be charged under the CFAA just because the crime they committed involved a computer.
- monocasa 5y agoWell, van Buren was convicted of a felony wire fraud charge as well with an equal length concurrently served sentence as the CFAA charge. So there was another crime we could charge him with, and we did successfully. The only difference is the lack of a CFAA charge on his record and some good case law about what the CFAA actually means so that hopefully it'll only be pushed against true computer crimes rather than crimes that happen to involve a computer.