EFF Files Appeal to Free Hacker "Weev" from Federal Prison

Hanni Fakhoury

EFF

As Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer finishes his third month in a federal penitentiary, we filed ourappeal of the computer researcher's conviction and 41-month prison sentence for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) andidentity theft statute on Monday.

Auernheimer's case is the latest chapter in the ongoing battle over the breadth of the CFAA, the sweeping federal anti-hacking law that has been stretched to cover all sorts of non-hacking behavior. Intended to go after malicious, criminal hacking, the CFAA has been aggressively used to prosecute behavior like creating a fake MySpace page, misusing employer data and, in the case ofAaron Swartz, downloading scholarly articles he was actually entitled to access.

Weev's conviction is a prime example of how the CFAA threatens security researchers with prison sentences for discovering security vulnerabilities.