Security News > 2020 > December > Supreme Court mulls whether a cop looking up a license plate for cash is equivalent to watching Instagram at work

Nowhere is that more clear than in a case heard in the US Supreme Court on Monday, covering a cop - former police sergeant Nathan Van Buren - who was convicted of breaking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 2017 after using his access to a police database of license plate numbers to look up the owner of a specific car for a cash payment.

Van Buren's lawyer, Jeffrey Fisher, argued that once someone is authorized to access a database, such a cop authorized to use a plate database, that's pretty much it - you can't be found guilty of fraud under the CFAA. The law, he argued, was intended only to address hacking - and his client didn't hack the computer.

Of course the government's lawyer, DoJ deputy solicitor general Eric Feigin, feels that the law is absolutely fine: the intention of the law is clear, the wording can be read in a specific way that avoids all the nightmare scenarios and the legal system will clear it up through case law.

Swartz's case led to repeat efforts to tidy up the CFAA to make it clear that terms of service were specifically excluded from the law.

That's currently not the case and the Supreme Court has to decide what to do with a law that was designed for one purpose, squeezed to fit another, and is now being applied to a third that was never envisioned.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/12/01/cffa_supreme_court/