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ACLU Lawsuit Challenges Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice contending that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act's criminal prohibitions have created a barrier for those wishing to conduct research and anti-discrimination testing online. The ACLU have pursued the matter on behalf of a group of academic researchers, computer scientists and journalists seeking to remove that barrier to allow for third-party testing and research into potential online discrimination. In a public statement the ACLU contend: "The CFAA violates the First Amendment because it limits everyone, including academics and journalists, from gathering the publicly available information necessary to understand and speak about online discrimination."
One of the provisions makes it a felony for unauthorized access to a computer system. In most EULAs it spells out that reverse engineering is disallowed and creates an area of unauthorized access. Thus a security researcher trying to analyze a system is technically committing a felony under the CFAA as it doesn't make any exceptions. Even if the analysis is being performed completely locally on systems they own if say the OS is Windows or MacOS.