There's Finally a Supreme Court Battle Coming Over the Nation's Main Hacking Law

Runaway1956 provide a submission which inspired this story.

Possibly paywalled: There's finally a Supreme Court battle coming over the nation's main hacking law (Alternative URL)

The Supreme Court is finally considering whether to rein in the nation's sweeping anti-hacking law, which cybersecurity pros say is decades out of date and ill-suited to the modern Internet.

The justices agreed to hear a case this fall that argues law enforcement and prosecutors have routinely applied the law too broadly and used it to criminalize not just hacking into websites but also far more innocuous behavior - such as lying about your name or location while signing up on a website or otherwise violating the site's terms of service.
If the court agrees to narrow how prosecutors can use the law, it would be a huge victory for security researchers.

They routinely skirt websites' strict terms of service when they investigate them for bugs that cybercriminals could exploit.

It would also make the Internet far safer, they say. That's because current interpretations of the 1986 law, known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse act (CFAA), have made researchers wary of revealing bugs they find because they fear getting in trouble with police or with companies, which can also sue under the law in civil courts.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.