THE MOST HATED LAW ON THE INTERNET AND ITS MANY PROBLEMS

Aaron Swartz killed himself at age 26 after been prosecuted with the CFAA. Noah Berger/Reuters

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) was the law that prosecutors deployed against Aaron Swartz, an internet activist who killed himself after a years-long legal battle centered around his decision to mass download academic journals.

On April 13, the CFAA was used to sentence Matthew Keys, a former LA Times employee accused of giving a username and password to a hacker who defaced an article, to two years in prison.

“The problem is [the CFAA] is so broadly written, and it fails to define what it seeks to prohibit,” Keys’ lawyer, Tor Ekeland, who plans on appealing, tells Newsweek.

Keys was convicted of giving the hacker collective Anonymous access to his old employers’ servers and telling them to “go fuck some shit up.” One of them did just that, and an article on the LA Times website was vandalized and stayed live for about 40 minutes before the paper’s staff fixed it. Keys still denies involvement.

Keys faced up to 25 years under the CFAA. “That seems disproportionate to me. It’s a silly prank that really didn’t harm anybody. This prosecution is a little over the top,” Ekeland says.

The CFAA makes it a federal crime to access a “protected computer,” but says the law only applies if the “value of such use” is $5,000, or if the person accessing the protected computer causes more than $5,000 in damage. But when the damage is data, or the cost of repairing a system, that number can be very hard to calculate. Early on, prosecutors put the damage of the LA Times vandalism, and the cost of responding to some harassing spam email messages they allege Keys sent, at $900,000—the court finally accepted damages of $18,000.

Ekeland argues the damages are even lower and should be below the law’s threshold.


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