This is all general and only one model which games follow. Another common model allows certain information to be stored by a 'master' or 'key-holder' of a game. For example, in FPS games or games which have 'rooms', this is often the case. In this case, that person's computer acts sort of like the server in some senses, holding a lot of the. Most people chose this as the best definition of computer-fraud-and-abuse-act-of-1986: See CFA. See the dictionary meaning, pronunciation, and sentence examples.
The Supreme Court on Monday considered how broadly to interpret the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America's main anti-hacking statute.
In short, the core issue in the case was when—if ever—violating the terms of use of a website or other computer system can lead to legal trouble. While the CFAA has been on the books since the 1980s, the nation's highest court has never addressed the question.
In short, the core issue in the case was when—if ever—violating the terms of use of a website or other computer system can lead to legal trouble. While the CFAA has been on the books since the 1980s, the nation's highest court has never addressed the question.
The core of Van Buren's argument is that, if he is convicted, it could open the door to criminal prosecution of others engaged in more innocuous conduct.
'This construction would brand most Americans criminals on a daily basis,' Jeff Fisher, the defendant's lawyer, said during Monday oral arguments conducted over Zoom. 'Imagine a secretary whose employee handbook says that her email or Zoom account may be used only for business purposes. Or consider a person using a dating website, where users may not include false information in their profile to obtain information about potential mates. Or think of a law student who is issued login credentials for Westlaw or Lexis for educational uses only.
'If the government is right, then a computer user who disregards any of these stated use restrictions commits a federal crime,' Fisher continued. 'For example, any employee who used a Zoom account over Thanksgiving to connect with distant relatives would be subject to the grace of federal prosecutors.'
'This construction would brand most Americans criminals on a daily basis,' Jeff Fisher, the defendant's lawyer, said during Monday oral arguments conducted over Zoom. 'Imagine a secretary whose employee handbook says that her email or Zoom account may be used only for business purposes. Or consider a person using a dating website, where users may not include false information in their profile to obtain information about potential mates. Or think of a law student who is issued login credentials for Westlaw or Lexis for educational uses only.
'If the government is right, then a computer user who disregards any of these stated use restrictions commits a federal crime,' Fisher continued. 'For example, any employee who used a Zoom account over Thanksgiving to connect with distant relatives would be subject to the grace of federal prosecutors.'
Eric Feigin, the attorney representing the Department of Justice, rejected Fisher's parade of horribles, arguing that none of Fisher's scenarios would actually lead to federal prosecution. He argued that when the law talks about 'authorized access,' it didn't mean to cover public websites—even websites that require a username and password.
'What Congress was aiming at here were people who were specifically trusted—people akin to employees, the kind of person who has actually been specifically considered and individually authorized,' Feigin said on Monday. Under his theory, someone who broke the rules of a dating website or a social media platform wouldn't be covered by the CFAA no matter what they did.
Feigin disagreed, arguing that the CFAA's 'authorization' required only when someone had been granted 'specific, individualized permission.'
This seems hard to square with past CFAA cases. TicketMaster's website, for example, is available to the general public. People who purchase tickets there aren't 'akin to employees.' Yet people got prosecuted for scraping it. Similarly, JSTOR doesn't hand-pick who is allowed to access academic articles—yet Swartz was prosecuted for downloading them without authorization.
'What Congress was aiming at here were people who were specifically trusted—people akin to employees, the kind of person who has actually been specifically considered and individually authorized,' Feigin said on Monday. Under his theory, someone who broke the rules of a dating website or a social media platform wouldn't be covered by the CFAA no matter what they did.
Feigin disagreed, arguing that the CFAA's 'authorization' required only when someone had been granted 'specific, individualized permission.'
This seems hard to square with past CFAA cases. TicketMaster's website, for example, is available to the general public. People who purchase tickets there aren't 'akin to employees.' Yet people got prosecuted for scraping it. Similarly, JSTOR doesn't hand-pick who is allowed to access academic articles—yet Swartz was prosecuted for downloading them without authorization.
- For complete classification of this Act to the Code, see Short Title note set out under section 2001 of Title 12 and Tables. Section 15 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, referred to in subsec. (e)(4)(F), is classified to section 78o of Title 15, Commerce and Trade. Section 1(b) of the International Banking Act of 1978, referred to in subsec.
- United States, No. 18-12024, The petition asks the Justices to resolve the longstanding circuit split on the meaning of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal unauthorized access statute.
- The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) was enacted in 1986, as an amendment to the first federal computer fraud law, to address hacking. Over the years, it has been amended several times, most recently in 2008, to cover a broad range of conduct far beyond its original intent. The CFAA prohibits intentionally accessing a computer without authorization or in excess of authorization, but fails.
Computer Fraud And Abuse Act Video Game Cheats
The government's position left some legal scholars scratching their heads.
'Until this case, everyone up to now, including [the Department of Justice], has agreed that the statute is incredibly broad other than the matter of authorization,' wrote Orin Kerr, a legal scholar who supports a narrow reading of the law. 'In this case, though, DOJ rejects DOJ's past views on this. Not just rejects, but mocks as utterly ridiculous, pure fantasy.'
'Beyond being inconsistent with DOJ's past positions, DOJ's new views don't seem to have a textual basis in the statute,' Kerr added. 'I've never heard DOJ's proposals before I read their brief, and I've been living this stuff, including while at DOJ, for over 20 years.'
'Until this case, everyone up to now, including [the Department of Justice], has agreed that the statute is incredibly broad other than the matter of authorization,' wrote Orin Kerr, a legal scholar who supports a narrow reading of the law. 'In this case, though, DOJ rejects DOJ's past views on this. Not just rejects, but mocks as utterly ridiculous, pure fantasy.'
'Beyond being inconsistent with DOJ's past positions, DOJ's new views don't seem to have a textual basis in the statute,' Kerr added. 'I've never heard DOJ's proposals before I read their brief, and I've been living this stuff, including while at DOJ, for over 20 years.'
Computer Fraud And Abuse Act Video Game Cheat Codes
The Supreme Court will finally rule on controversial US hacking law
Computer Fraud And Abuse Act Video Game Cheating
The government's new reading of the CFAA surprised legal scholars.
Computer Fraud And Abuse Act Video Game Cheat Sheet
Can deleting information, even personal information, from your work computer land you in prison? That was the central question posed in USA v. Zeng, Case No. 4:16-cr-00172 in the Northern District of California.
Mr. Zeng is a former employee of gaming company Machine Zone, Inc., a Silicon Valley company famous for its “Game of War: Fire Age” video game and its commercials featuring supermodel Kate Upton and former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was charged with one felony count of “damaging” his company-issued laptop under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”).
Mr. Zeng was arrested by the FBI in August 2015, after being accused of stealing trade secrets from Machine Zone. The FBI alleged that Mr. Zeng was attempting to use the purportedly stolen trade secrets in China. The arrest and the subsequent arraignment were widely covered in the media.
After more than a year of legal motions and negotiations, the prosecution dismissed most of the charges, including the allegations of trade secret theft. However, the government maintained a single felony charge under the damage provision of the CFAA, which prohibits, “knowingly caus[ing] the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally caus[ing] damage without authorization, to a protected computer.” (18 U.S.C. § 1030 (a)(5)).
Codified in 1986, the CFAA targets hackers. It contains various subsections that impose civil penalties and make it a crime to do such acts as accessing or deleting electronic information without authorization. The law, however, has come under widespread criticism in the media for its overbreadth. Critics claim that the law gives corporations and federal prosecutors unchecked power to prosecute employees for almost any conduct they commit on their work machines, even deleting personal files temporarily saved on a work computer.
The popular criticism of the CFAA has spread into the Courts. There, most of the litigation has focused on what employees are authorized to do on their work computers and what corporate outsiders are allowed to do with publicly viewable information on social media websites. For example, is an employee who has access to a certain database for technical purposes allowed to actually view it, even for a non-work purpose? Can a company scrape publicly viewable data on Facebook and make use of it? The answer to these questions depends largely on the scope of the authorization that the employee or the visitor to the Facebook page has.
Mr. Zeng’s case, however, focused on a different aspect of the CFAA, namely, what constitutes damage to a computer? In a federal criminal trial before the Honorable Judge James Donato held in July, the federal government argued that the deletion of any information, no matter whether the deletion was permanent, or whether the information deleted was valuable to Mr. Zeng’s employer, qualified as damage under the CFAA so long as it could prove Mr. Zeng intended to delete the information. In other words, intentionally pressing the “Delete” key constituted the transmission of a command that damaged a protected computer. Indeed, since Mr. Zeng had admittedly erased the contents of the laptop before returning it to the company, the government’s proposed interpretation of the CFAA was breathtakingly broad.
Conversely, Mr. Zeng presented several arguments that would limit the scope of the CFAA’s damage provision. He argued, based on case law from other jurisdictions, that the deletion had to occur via an external transmission. He also argued that the government had to prove that the company could not access the deleted information via an alternative source. Judge Donato tested both sides’ arguments but appeared particularly troubled by the broad scope of the government’s argument. During the government’s closing argument, Judge Donato asked the government’s lawyer whether it made her queasy that an employee, in a dyspeptic moment, could erase files from his or her computer and be guilty of a federal felony? The lawyer responded with an argument that in this case Mr. Zeng’s conduct exhibited more than a mere dyspeptic moment but dodged the Court’s more generalized fear.
Ultimately, Judge Donato demonstrated that this thought at least made him queasy. On December 5, Judge Donato found Mr. Zeng not guilty without providing further explanation. In case you’re wondering, he did not need to provide an explanation for his decision. Of course, this was great news for Mr. Zeng, who had endured criminal prosecution for over two years. However, without the benefit of Judge Donato’s reasoning, the scope of the CFAA’s damage provision remains nebulous.
Unless you have been living in a bunker for at least the past year, you know that hacking is one of the central topics facing corporations and law enforcement these days. Beyond the news of Russia’s state-sponsored hack of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, there have been other high-profile hacks such as the Equifax data breach in 2017. These well-known hacks underscore the danger posed by failures in cybersecurity as technology becomes more ubiquitous in everyday life. However, the laws we have to fight these hacks, such as the CFAA, are antiquated and, as in Mr. Zeng’s case, can target innocent people. Cases like Mr. Zeng’s make clear that in addressing the critical need for cybersecurity, we must update the laws that enforce it to ensure that we protect the public safety without compromising the freedoms we value so dearly.
Mr. Zeng is a former employee of gaming company Machine Zone, Inc., a Silicon Valley company famous for its “Game of War: Fire Age” video game and its commercials featuring supermodel Kate Upton and former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was charged with one felony count of “damaging” his company-issued laptop under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”).
Mr. Zeng was arrested by the FBI in August 2015, after being accused of stealing trade secrets from Machine Zone. The FBI alleged that Mr. Zeng was attempting to use the purportedly stolen trade secrets in China. The arrest and the subsequent arraignment were widely covered in the media.
After more than a year of legal motions and negotiations, the prosecution dismissed most of the charges, including the allegations of trade secret theft. However, the government maintained a single felony charge under the damage provision of the CFAA, which prohibits, “knowingly caus[ing] the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally caus[ing] damage without authorization, to a protected computer.” (18 U.S.C. § 1030 (a)(5)).
Codified in 1986, the CFAA targets hackers. It contains various subsections that impose civil penalties and make it a crime to do such acts as accessing or deleting electronic information without authorization. The law, however, has come under widespread criticism in the media for its overbreadth. Critics claim that the law gives corporations and federal prosecutors unchecked power to prosecute employees for almost any conduct they commit on their work machines, even deleting personal files temporarily saved on a work computer.
The popular criticism of the CFAA has spread into the Courts. There, most of the litigation has focused on what employees are authorized to do on their work computers and what corporate outsiders are allowed to do with publicly viewable information on social media websites. For example, is an employee who has access to a certain database for technical purposes allowed to actually view it, even for a non-work purpose? Can a company scrape publicly viewable data on Facebook and make use of it? The answer to these questions depends largely on the scope of the authorization that the employee or the visitor to the Facebook page has.
Mr. Zeng’s case, however, focused on a different aspect of the CFAA, namely, what constitutes damage to a computer? In a federal criminal trial before the Honorable Judge James Donato held in July, the federal government argued that the deletion of any information, no matter whether the deletion was permanent, or whether the information deleted was valuable to Mr. Zeng’s employer, qualified as damage under the CFAA so long as it could prove Mr. Zeng intended to delete the information. In other words, intentionally pressing the “Delete” key constituted the transmission of a command that damaged a protected computer. Indeed, since Mr. Zeng had admittedly erased the contents of the laptop before returning it to the company, the government’s proposed interpretation of the CFAA was breathtakingly broad.
Conversely, Mr. Zeng presented several arguments that would limit the scope of the CFAA’s damage provision. He argued, based on case law from other jurisdictions, that the deletion had to occur via an external transmission. He also argued that the government had to prove that the company could not access the deleted information via an alternative source. Judge Donato tested both sides’ arguments but appeared particularly troubled by the broad scope of the government’s argument. During the government’s closing argument, Judge Donato asked the government’s lawyer whether it made her queasy that an employee, in a dyspeptic moment, could erase files from his or her computer and be guilty of a federal felony? The lawyer responded with an argument that in this case Mr. Zeng’s conduct exhibited more than a mere dyspeptic moment but dodged the Court’s more generalized fear.
Ultimately, Judge Donato demonstrated that this thought at least made him queasy. On December 5, Judge Donato found Mr. Zeng not guilty without providing further explanation. In case you’re wondering, he did not need to provide an explanation for his decision. Of course, this was great news for Mr. Zeng, who had endured criminal prosecution for over two years. However, without the benefit of Judge Donato’s reasoning, the scope of the CFAA’s damage provision remains nebulous.
Unless you have been living in a bunker for at least the past year, you know that hacking is one of the central topics facing corporations and law enforcement these days. Beyond the news of Russia’s state-sponsored hack of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, there have been other high-profile hacks such as the Equifax data breach in 2017. These well-known hacks underscore the danger posed by failures in cybersecurity as technology becomes more ubiquitous in everyday life. However, the laws we have to fight these hacks, such as the CFAA, are antiquated and, as in Mr. Zeng’s case, can target innocent people. Cases like Mr. Zeng’s make clear that in addressing the critical need for cybersecurity, we must update the laws that enforce it to ensure that we protect the public safety without compromising the freedoms we value so dearly.