Computer Fraud Statutes, Part I

Like the RICO Statutes that were originally designed to combat organized crime and soon took on a life of their own by being applied to a wide-range of seemingly legitimate businesses, the New Jersey and federal computer fraud statutes have now vastly exceeded their original purpose of preventing tampering with computers.

There are a number of differences between the New Jersey Computer Fraud Statute (N.J.S.A. 2A:38-1) and the federal Computer Fraud Statute (18 U.S.C. § 1030).  In this post I intend to discuss one of the more significant differences.  In subsequent posts, I will discuss additional differences.

The federal statute specially applies to those that access a computer without "authorization or exceeding authorized access" while the New Jersey computer fraud statute addresses unauthorized access.  This distinction is significant.