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Clerk Printed Lottery Tickets She Didn't Pay For But Didn't Break Hacking Law (arstechnica.com)
Violating a company rule is not -- and should not be -- a computer crime, that was the ruling of the Oregon Supreme Court in State v. Nascimento file. The Oregon's highest court ruled that while a convenience store clerk was guilty of stealing lottery tickets through the store's computer system, she did not violate the state's anti-hacking law while doing so. ArsTechnica shares more details: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which appeared on Caryn Nascimento's behalf during the case as an amicus curae (friend of the court), announced the narrow victory on Tuesday. According to the Supreme Court's decision, the case dates back to 2007, when Nascimento began working at Tiger Mart, a small convenience store in Madras, Oregon, about 120 miles southeast of Portland. In late 2008 and early 2009, a company vice president began investigating what appeared to be cash shortages at that store, sometimes about $1,000 per day. After reviewing video recordings that correlated with Nascimento's work schedule, this executive began to suspect that she was buying lottery tickets but not paying for them. Eventually, Nascimento was charged not only with aggravated first-degree theft but also of violating the state's computer crime law, which includes language that "any person who knowingly and without authorization uses, accesses or attempts to access any computer, computer system, computer network, or any computer software, program, documentation or data contained in such computer, computer system or computer network, commits computer crime." She was convicted on both charges at trial. On appeal before the Oregon Supreme Court, Nascimento's lawyers argued that while their client may have violated a company policy to not print lottery tickets that she did not receive payment for, she was, in fact, authorized to access the lottery printing computer.
Look, when someone breaks the law, punish them for what they did, not things that are SIMILAR to what they did.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
And someone just "investigated"?
Was the boss asleep? Whenever I've worked retail, a report was required for more than $20 missing from a cash drawer...
$1,000 would have been unthinkable!
There are two common-sense readings, and the court took one of them.
The other common-sense reading is that the employee was only authorized to access the device to do things that complied with company policy, and that her authorization to accessed it was implicitly suspended during the time she was violating company policy.
Since the court went the way they went, expect some companies in Oregon to go back and spell out very clearly that when you are using company equipment in violation of company policy, your authorization to use the equipment is immediately suspended for the duration of your out-of-policy use and, as a result, you are violating Oregon state law and that the company reserves the right to press charges.
Personally, I think the court made the right decision, because 1) it's very easy for companies to "work around it" by modifying their policies, and 2) the court's ruling prevents "gotcha" situations where the law was ambiguous and, prior to a judge ruling on the issue to remove the ambiguity, a reasonable person could read the law as not applying.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's about time someone set the right precedent. Now there's finally some good case law for every count of "crime...but on a computer" to NOT count as a violation of CFAA.
What was the value of the lottery tickets stolen ? Was it valued at the $1.00 per pick or the value if you won ? It was only $1.00 at the time of the theft, can they retroactively apply appreciation to the value of the item ? If you stole $10.00 from the till and one of the dollars turned out to be a rare silver certificate, but that fact was unknown to any party involved at the time of the crime, I wonder if the crime is still a $10.00 theft ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?