Article via chatter in #development. https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/29/supreme-court-van-buren-hacking/
“If there are potential criminal (and civil) consequences for violating a computerized system’s usage policy, that would empower the owners of such systems to prohibit bona fide security research and to silence researchers from disclosing any vulnerabilities they find in those systems,” said Pfefferkorn. “Even inadvertently coloring outside the lines of a set of bug bounty rules could expose a researcher to liability.” — Tech Crunch
I’m slightly confused at how it got this far. Mainly because I guess I – and – others I know have ignored it and the companies welcoming it have ignored it. I suppose this is the beauty of US “hacking” laws and what companies and individuals can agree on.
I could say, “you can hack my network from afar for pen testing purposes,” and it’d be legal because persmission was given. Not to mention the fact of you using “my” home network, I can see whatever you do – and if one were to consider this a privacy invasion they should use all available tools to shield their activity.
But we also have to understand tampering, even in the slightest or in its fullest shouldn’t constitute an “arrest” simply because we can fall on “who was a victim of this,” and if there were no victim(s) then there are clearly zero crimes. However, you’d wanna take into consideration just what was seen during that access, trade secrets, unreleased IP, etc, it’s all questionable and relative, but… I never, ever want hacking to be considered bad.
Because it’s not all bad. It’s easy to tell who was malicious and who was not. …… with that being said, I guess the court ruling on it may help clarify and update the language to reflect today’s society regarding electronics/technology and hacking.