Focusing the CFAA in Van Buren

Abstract

Imagine you are focusing a lens. At first, everything is blurry. As you adjust the lens, however, the picture starts to become clearer. Shapes and colors emerge. Ideally you can reach complete focus and make everything sharp. But maybe you can only go part way. The partiallyadjusted image is more revealing than when you started. But the picture is not yet sharp. Van Buren v. United States is the Supreme Court’s first decision interpreting the federal computer-crime statute known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Enacted in the 1980s, the CFAA sat unexamined by the Supreme Court during an astonishing societal transformation. Computers and the Internet went from the domain of a few computer geeks to a routine part of daily life formost Americans. During that time, the CFAA’s text became a source of extraordinary uncertainty. The statute might be narrow and apply rarely, the thinking went, or it might be incredibly broad and criminalize a great deal of routine computer use. Before Van Buren, no one knew.