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Washington Supreme Court Building: The broad interpretation of the law does not last legally
Photo: ERIN SCOTT / REUTERS
In a sensational ruling, the US Supreme Court has shown police and prosecutors new limits if they want to use a so-called hacker paragraph.
The "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" (CFAA) had caused a lot of criticism in the past - especially after the death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.
According to the decision of the court, it is no longer sufficient if a user violates the general terms and conditions of use to be convicted as a criminal hacker.
Instead, a suspect actually needs to access information that he did not have access to in order for the law to be applied.
The case under discussion was about the Georgia policeman Nathan Van Buren, who asked for a license plate for a fee and passed the information on.
What Van Buren didn't know: The man who paid him to provide the information was an FBI informant.
The policeman was released and sentenced to a year and a half in prison.
Fuzzy rules
However, the decision of the highest federal judge has significance far beyond this case.
In the opinion of critics, prosecutors used the relevant paragraph from 1986 almost excessively whenever an accused had used a computer improperly.
"Employers usually stipulate that a computer in the workplace may only be used for professional purposes," said the attorney Van Burens his course before the Supreme Court.
"The way the government interprets the law, an employee sending a private email or reading the news in the office would already be a lawbreaker."
Judge Amy Comey Barrett, who was appointed to the Supreme Court last year, shared this view.
The decision was borne by both the more liberal judges and the judges nominated by Trump.
However, three conservative judges voted against it.
In the end, the legal dispute hung on only two letters, it was about the word "so" in a sentence in the legal text, which the judges interpreted differently.
The underlying question was this: Is someone like the police officer who has illegally disclosed data really considered a hacker - even though he had legal access to the database in the course of his work?
The majority decided that the legal definition of computer fraud does not go that far.
Threatened 35 years imprisonment
The CFAA has been criticized for years. The case of Aaron Swartz in particular stirred up the Internet scene: in 2010, the Internet activist downloaded five million scientific articles from the JSTOR digital library, which were then published on the file-sharing portal "The Pirate Bay". Swartz felt the full severity of the law: he was charged and threatened with 35 years imprisonment. Before the trial could begin, however, Swartz's girlfriend found him dead in his apartment in January.
The case caused consternation in IT circles.
Among other things, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berner-Lee, spoke out in favor of the activist.
The Democratic MP Zoe Lofgren even introduced "Aaron's Law" to the House of Representatives, which was supposed to defuse the anti-hacking laws.
But the reform stranded in the US legislative process.
There were also initially large protests against the German “hacker paragraph”, which was passed in 2007, because it was feared that it would be used in a similar manner.
The law prohibits the use of so-called hacking tools, with which, for example, passwords can be cracked.
However, these programs are also important for IT security researchers.
In practice, however, Section 202c rarely leads to convictions.
With material from AP