Too Much Protection for Computer Security

Generally, I find that my posts advocate additional protections for data privacy, and argue that people don't pay enough attention to security. This is post is the exception, where I unequivocally state that people should not be criminally liable for violating a website's terms of service, even if such a violation may technically be prohibited by the computer fraud and abuse act. As is admirably laid out in this post in the Wired threat level blog, the consequences of attaching criminal liability to a terms of service violation would be severe. However, while that post, which argues that a criminal conviction based on a terms of service violation is likely to be overturned, I'm not so sure. The computer fraud and abuse act can be analogized, roughly, to a criminal trespass statute. While I doubt that Congress intended to make random terms of service violations criminal acts when it passed the CFAA, in the real world criminal trespass can be based on entry onto the land of another in violation of restrictions placed on entry by the owner (see ORC 2911.21(A)(2)). Thus, it wouldn't be such a stretch to imagine that the application of the CFAA to a terms of service violation will be upheld. True, I think it would be a bad result, but it would be a result that would not be outside the realm of the possible.