The CFAA makes knowing, purposeful access to computer systems you don&#x27;t have permission to use a crime, and a felony when that access is used to attempt to perpetrate additional crimes. It&#x27;s a simple statute.<p>There are two common arguments against CFAA.<p>The first is that it shouldn&#x27;t be a felony to access computer systems without authorization. The logic goes: if you use access to a computer system to perpetrate a fraud, charge fraud. If theft, charge theft.<p>A variant of this argument suggests that maybe &quot;serious hacking&quot; should be a felony, but things like reusing an old password, or guessing the URL after the login screen, those things shouldn&#x27;t be felonious.<p>These arguments are problematic. For instance, in cases where the offender has used their unauthorized access solely to cause economic harm to someone else, there may not be a better crime to charge. The vandalism statutes weren&#x27;t designed for offenses that can easily rack up tens of thousands of dollars. There&#x27;s also the basic issue of trespass and violation of property rights. And, of course, civil remedies to these problems have their own problems, prominent among them the fact that all the burden for collecting those remedies falls on the victim, who under civil law receives no assistance from the rest of society.<p>The second set of arguments against CFAA is that the sentences are draconian. This argument seems much more straightforward. A particular problem with CFAA is that the sentence scales with damage, but damage can trivially scale with the induction variable of a program&#x27;s loop; it does not seem intuitively just that typing an extra &#x27;0&#x27; into a single program can ratchet your sentence by years.<p>A variant of this argument suggests that damages are also inflated by victims and prosecutors. This is likely very true, but it&#x27;s less meaningful in this case than in others, because even the most charitable view of the offenses charged suggest he did more than 15k of damages, and is facing a multi-year sentence.<p>I think CFAA should be reformed so that damages accelerate sentences only to the extent that the prosecution can prove intent to cause damage. That wouldn&#x27;t much help Keys, though, who is convicted of deliberately trying to maximize the harm to Tribune Corporation.