Computer Fraud Laws Used to Prosecute Leaking Air Crash Footage to CNN

Summary

Investigators Used Terrible Computer Fraud Laws To Ensure People Were Punished For Leaking Air Crash Footage To CNN from the if-it-can-be-abused,-it-WILL-be-abused dept Earlier this year, an Army helicopter collided with a passenger plane over the Potomac River in Washington, DC. All sixty-seven people aboard both vehicles were killed. While the FAA focused its investigation on the failures that led to this mid-air collision, local investigators in Virginia were somehow far more concerned about identifying who had leaked footage of the collision to CNN. The subject matter of the leaked recordings was obviously of public interest. And while the government may have its own interest in controlling dissemination of recording of incidents that involve federal agencies and their oversight, it’s not the sort of government interest most courts consider to be worthy of violating the First Amendment. Fortunately, the government has options. For a very long time, the option federal law enforcement deployed most frequently in cases involving pretty much any sort of technology was the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). This broadly written law not only allowed prosecutors to charge people with federal crimes for doing nothing more than interacting with services/servers/etc. in unexpected ways, but allowed companies to, essentially, shoot the messengers for reporting data breaches, unsecured servers, or sloppy user interfaces that could be exploited to display far more information than those running them intended. The CFAA has since been neutered a bit, slowing its abusive role in federal prosecutions. Unfortunately, there are plenty of sloppily written state laws that can accomplish what the CFAA no longer can, as Nikita Mazurov and Shawn Musgrave report for The Intercept. Here’s what Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority investigator Patrick Silsbee wrote in his report: “The video shows camera angles and views that can only be found on the Metropolitan Washington Airport...