Digital Media and Data Privacy Law Blog

Zounds, right?  But that is arguably what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in Facebook v. Power Ventures, Inc. on July 12^th.  Let’s get to it.

Facts

Power Ventures and its CEO Steven Vachani operated a social network called Power.com. The concept was simple. People using other social networking sites could create a Power account to aggregate the user’s social networking information. The users could keep track of a variety of social networking friends through a single program and click through the central Power website to ... Read More 

When we last left David Nosal, he had escaped liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after convincing some of his former colleagues at executive search firm Korn/Ferry to use their log-in credentials to download source lists, names and contact information from a confidential database and transfer that information to Nosal.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that violating Korn/Ferry’s policy against disclosing confidential information did not amount to violations of the CFAA, and overturned his convictions under that law. 

But the government ... Read More 

We don’t usually talk about four-year-old court decisions in the first instance here.  But the Ninth Circuit has issued a pair of noteworthy opinions interpreting the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the last few weeks.  And to understand those it will help to understand United States v. Nosal, 676 F.3d 854 (9th Cir. 2012), an en banc opinion authored by Judge Kozinski.

Facts

The facts are mercifully short.  David Nosal used to work for Korn/Ferry, an executive search firm.  Shortly after he left the company, he convinced some of his former colleagues who were still working for ... Read More 

Like many people, Aaron Graham and Eric Jordan carried cell phones around in 2011. Unlike most people, Graham and Jordan were convicted of crimes arising from their participation in a series of armed robberies[1] in that period, and were soon sorry that they had their cell phones on them when those robberies happened.  Sitting en banc, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit just made them sorry last Tuesday in United States v. Graham, No. 12-4659 (4th Cir. May 31, 2016).

Because in their investigation, federal agents sought the cell-site location information (or “CSLI” as ... Read More 

I’ve long thought that sending faxes was a pretty silly means of communication.  Don’t send me a fax.  I don’t want it.  At some point I’m hoping that even my kids’ doctor’s office will get dragged into the 20^th century and drop their insistence on faxing.  In the meantime a pdf will be fine, thanks.  In addition to the many reasons faxes are antiquated and annoying, the SEC has just provided us another reason to avoid them: they encourage violations of Reg. S-P!

The Rule

Reg. S-P’s Safeguards Rule requires that every broker-dealer registered with the SEC adopt policies and ... Read More 

You may be too young for this to have been a big thing to you, but almost 30 years ago, D.C. Circuit Judge Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court, and Washington, D.C. went into a tizzy.  Coming as it did just a year after Antonin Scalia joined the Court in 1986, Judge Bork’s nomination had many people very excited and very motivated: some to have him on the Court, and some to keep him off.  In the midst of this hooha, a writer at the Washington City Paper thought it would be cool if Bork’s local video store would share a list of the judge’s rentals.  It did.  And at the time it was completely ... Read More 

If you’ve ever attended the SEC Speaks conference, you know that the official program is an intensely uninteresting collection of short speeches by SEC officials who don’t have a lot of incentives to say groundbreaking things.  But occasionally there are exceptions.  I think Deputy Director Stephanie Avakian’s discussion of cybersecurity cases on Friday was one of those.

Avakian broke those cases down into three categories.

1. Failures of registered entities to safeguard information.  She cited the R.T. Jones Capital Equities Management case from September of last year as an ...