The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA) is a United States cybersecurity bill that was enacted in 1986 as an amendment to existing computer fraud law, which had been included in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Prior to computer-specific criminal laws, computer crimes were prosecuted as mail and wire fraud, but the applying law was often insufficient.
Aaron Hillel Swartz, also known as AaronSw, was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; the Python website framework web.py; and the lightweight markup language format Markdown. Swartz was involved in the development of the social news aggregation website Reddit until he departed from the company in 2007. He is often credited as a martyr and a prodigy, and his work focused on civic awareness and activism.
James Andrew Baker is a former American government official at the Department of Justice who served as general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and later served as deputy general counsel at Twitter, Inc. before being fired by Elon Musk in December 2022.
The Terrorist Surveillance Program was an electronic surveillance program implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was part of the President's Surveillance Program, which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA, a signals intelligence agency, implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person. In 2005, The New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications which were "purely domestic" in nature, igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Later works, such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, described how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much, much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article, former NSA employee Bill Binney said that his colleagues told him that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from "everyone in the country."
Christopher Soghoian is a privacy researcher and activist. He is currently working for Senator Ron Wyden as the senator’s Senior Advisor for Privacy & Cybersecurity. From 2012 to 2016, he was the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Matthew Glen Olsen is an American attorney who has served as the Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division since 2021. He is the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Robbins v. Lower Merion School District is a federal class action lawsuit, brought during February 2010 on behalf of students of two high schools in Lower Merion Township, a suburb of Philadelphia. In October 2010, the school district agreed to pay $610,000 to settle the Robbins and parallel Hasan lawsuits against it.
Jerome Heckenkamp was an Australian-American computer expert. After completing his education at a young age, he worked as a computer network engineer. He was later convicted of hacking attacks on several prominent corporations and universities.
Marc Zwillinger is the founder and managing member of the Washington, D.C. based data privacy and information security law firm ZwillGen. Zwillinger has been active in the field of Internet law on issues such as encryption, data security, government access to user data, data breaches, and fantasy sports.
In United States of America v. Aaron Swartz, Aaron Swartz, an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist, was prosecuted for multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA), after downloading academic journal articles through the MIT computer network from a source (JSTOR) for which he had an account as a Harvard research fellow. Federal prosecutors eventually charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines plus 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release. Facing trial and the possibility of imprisonment, Swartz died by suicide, and the case was consequently dismissed.
Stephen P. Heymann is an attorney who formerly served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. He is no longer with the U.S. Attorney's office. He headed U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz's Internet and Computer Crimes Unit.
The Day We Fight Back was a one-day global protest against mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the UK GCHQ, and the other Five Eyes partners involved in global surveillance. The "digital protest" took place on February 11, 2014 with more than 6,000 participating websites, which primarily took the form of webpage banner-advertisements that read, "Dear Internet, we're sick of complaining about the NSA. We want new laws that curtail online surveillance. Today we fight back." Organizers hoped lawmakers would be made aware "that there's going to be ongoing public pressure until these reforms are instituted."
Tor Bernhard Ekeland is a New York City based computer, trial and appellate lawyer. He is best known for representing hackers prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA"), as well as white-collar defendants, in federal criminal court and on appeal across the United States.
SEXINT is the practice of monitoring and/or characterizing/indexing the pornographic preferences of internet users in an effort to later use the information for blackmail. The term is a portmanteau of sexual intelligence retrieved on an intelligence service target and was first used by Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
Marcia Clare Hofmann is an American attorney and US-UK Fulbright Scholar. Hofmann is known for her work as an advocate of electronic privacy and free expression, including defending individuals charged with high-profile computer crimes, such as Marcus Hutchins and Weev.
Government hacking permits the exploitation of vulnerabilities in electronic products, especially software, to gain remote access to information of interest. This information allows government investigators to monitor user activity and interfere with device operation. Government attacks on security may include malware and encryption backdoors. The National Security Agency's PRISM program and Ethiopia's use of FinSpy are notable examples.
Andrea M. Matwyshyn is an American law professor and engineering professor at The Pennsylvania State University. She is known as a scholar of technology policy, particularly as an expert at the intersection of law and computer security and for her work with government. She is credited with originating the legal and policy concept of the Internet of Bodies.
Michael A. Sussmann is an American former federal prosecutor and a former partner at the law firm Perkins Coie, who focused on privacy and cybersecurity law. Sussmann represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and retained CrowdStrike to examine its servers after two Russian hacker groups penetrated DNC networks and stole information during the 2016 U.S. elections.
Camille Stewart is an American technology and cybersecurity attorney, public speaker, and entrepreneur. She served as the Senior Policy advisor for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration from 2015 to 2017 under the Barack Obama administration. She also served as the Head of Product Security Strategy Google after serving as the Lead for Security Policy & Election Integrity, Google Play & Android at Google.
Joe Sullivan is an American Internet security expert. Having served as a federal prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice, he worked as a CSO at Facebook, Uber and Cloudflare. For his role in covering up the 2016 data breaches at Uber, he was convicted in October 2022 on federal felony charges of obstruction and misprision. In January 2023, he took on the role of CEO of Ukraine Friends, a nonprofit focused on humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
