Van Buren is a victory against overbroad interpretations of the CFAA
This ruling is really confusing for me.  So I feel pretty strongly that what van Buren did is a massive abuse of authority and it warrants punishment.  Yet so many people I usually agree with (SCOTUS judges, EFF, privacy lawyers) are all calling this a win.<p>Am I missing something?  To me, this ruling means that if a person is granted technical access to a computer system, then that person cannot be held criminally liable for anything they do with access to that system, even if the owner explicitly prohibits it.<p>In other words, lets say I work at a gay hookup website and they grant me access to their production database as part of my job.  If I start selling off information about user to third parties (say journalists), how can that be legal?<p>Aside, I do understand and agree with the argument allowing for spidering and screen scrapping.  Like, if I buy a subscription to an online parts catalog, I should be able to use a bot to access that data in the same ways a human could.