> [Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney] Barrett ruled that for the CFAA, a person violates the "exceeds authorized access" language when they access files or other information that is off-limits to them on a computer system that they otherwise have authorized access to. The majority opinion distinguished this from Van Buren's case, in that the information that he obtained was within the limits of what he could access with his authorization, but was done for improper reasons, and thus he could not be charged under CFAA for this crime.
This still does criminalize logging into your mom’s Netflix account, probably (?), but at least browsing HN on your work computer not covered anymore.
If you steal your mom’s password without consent and she argues that you accessed information on the account that you were not authorized to see, maybe.
However the quote on its own is not necessarily true without further qualifications as mentioned above.
> However the quote on its own is not necessarily true without further qualifications as mentioned above.
It's absolutely true, you're accessing an unauthorized account. All law enforcement need to do is ask you, did you access an electronic account that was not yours ?
Some of the CFAA has been dialed back by the courts, but CFAA is a federal level offense. The scarier ones exist at the state level, e.g. Illinois specifically criminalizes violating the terms and conditions of a web site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States (2020):
> [Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney] Barrett ruled that for the CFAA, a person violates the "exceeds authorized access" language when they access files or other information that is off-limits to them on a computer system that they otherwise have authorized access to. The majority opinion distinguished this from Van Buren's case, in that the information that he obtained was within the limits of what he could access with his authorization, but was done for improper reasons, and thus he could not be charged under CFAA for this crime.
This still does criminalize logging into your mom’s Netflix account, probably (?), but at least browsing HN on your work computer not covered anymore.
If you steal your mom’s password without consent and she argues that you accessed information on the account that you were not authorized to see, maybe.
However the quote on its own is not necessarily true without further qualifications as mentioned above.
No, it's about logging in to someone else's account against the Netflix ToS. Netflix doesn't want you to access their computer systems that way.
> However the quote on its own is not necessarily true without further qualifications as mentioned above.
It's absolutely true, you're accessing an unauthorized account. All law enforcement need to do is ask you, did you access an electronic account that was not yours ?
Nuance will be ignored when it suits them.
Some of the CFAA has been dialed back by the courts, but CFAA is a federal level offense. The scarier ones exist at the state level, e.g. Illinois specifically criminalizes violating the terms and conditions of a web site.