Who says D.C. is completely gridlocked?
In September, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) and John
Hoeven (R–N.D.) introduced the Cloud Computing Act of 2012
(S.3569) as a proposed amendment to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
The CFAA is a hybrid criminal-civil law, passed originally as a
purely anti-hacker criminal statute, which prohibits wrongful
access to computers. It has been used with varying success by
employers to deal with internal data breaches and misappropriation
by employees.
This bipartisan tweak to the CFAA would specify that each
instance of "unauthorized access" (the lynchpin of
liability under the CFAA) of a cloud computing account is a
separate offense. Loss is presumed to be the greater of the
value of the loss of use or information, or a minimum of $500
multiplied by the number of cloud computing accounts
accessed.
