Comment by jeffparsons
14 hours ago
Or in case some folks find the addition of a computer confusing here, if someone sends you a physical letter and they've used correction tape or a black marker to obscure some parts of the letter, and you scratch away the correction tape or hold the letter up to a light source to read what's underneath, have you committed a crime?
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the law has to say about this. But I do have at least a small handful of brain cells to rub together, so I know what the law _should_ say about this.
Precisely. If someone wants me to sign a contract on acceptable use of resources (like an agreement not to reverse engineer their software) they send me then that's another thing.
Absent that excluding other default protections like copyright, what I do with it should fall under the assumption of "basically anything".
If this were prior to 2021, I would say the CFAA could be violated so long as the property owner's _intentions_ were for that information to only be accessible to certain users. But I think the CFAA has been sufficiently reduced in scope after Van Buren v United States [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States