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When does a journalist become a hacker?
Journalist Tim Burke is facing charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. After all this time, is the federal anti-hacking statute still broken?
(The timing was inadvertently clutch, as shortly thereafter Netflix began to crack down on password sharing and everyone started getting whipped up over AI companies scraping websites against operators’ wishes.) Keys, whose actions there resemble neither hacking nor journalism, was prosecuted under a provision of the CFAA prohibiting “damage without authorization.” It’s a different section of the law, though the same sticky problem with the meaning of “authorization” pops up yet again. Swartz scraped JSTOR in hopes of liberating scholarship for the whole world; Auernheimer, who did not write any of the code he was jailed for, acted as the official hype man for the AT&T breach because he loves attention.
Or read this on The Verge