1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act (CFA)

Objectives
After a close examination of the journal article “The Unconstitutionality of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act”, Michael C. Mikulic addressed the following points:
• Overviewed the history of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)and its objectives.
• Discussed both the broad and narrow interpretations of the law by various circuit courts.
• Analyzed the broad interpretation of the law and identified key aspects of the law that deem the CFAA unconstitutional.
• Proposed a probable solution to the broad interpretation of the law.
Summary
The author traces the CFAA history to the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act (CCCA) which was narrow in scope, with the purpose to address unauthorized access computer crimes. As computers in households
• The author contends that the broad interpretation of the law is unconstitutional.
In particular, that 45% of the court circuits have adopted as broad interpretation of the law while only 36% have adopted a narrow interpretation of the law (Mikulic, 2016). The cautionary tale that the author spelled out in part I of the article was in particular an eye opener. The famous hacker and “internet troll” (Lennard, 2014) Weev (Andrew Auernheimer) was “sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for revealing to media outlets that AT&T had configured its servers to allow the harvesting of iPad owners' unsecured email addresses” (EFF, 2013). Both Weev and co-defendant Daniel Spitler used “a script that [exploited] the security hole to collect roughly 120,000 email addresses” (EFF, 2013). Weev was indicted under the provisions of the CFAA law, in particular the broad interpretation of the law. In which Weev had exploited a security hole that AT&T had failed to secure. I found that the author described a strong case where millions of Americans can be punished under the broad scope of