A public service notice: the alleged actions of Cambridge Analytica reported by the BBC and by The Guardian, where CA illegally gained access to millions of Facebook profiles where a Russian “professor” posed as a “researcher”, if they happened as reported then they were likely 50 million counts of illegal, unauthorized hacking of private Facebook profiles, paid for by hostile agents of a foreign government with the purpose to overthrow the upcoming U.S. government — to benefit the Trump campaign.

Their actions appear to be running afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030), at minimum, which is the statute that was used to throw the book at Aaron Swartz for essentially publishing articles from his university server that were already public.

IANAL, but illegal unauthorized access to a computer system is very broadly defined in the statue:

(4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period

Robert Mueller using the same statute to establish 50 million counts of illegal for-profit “gaining access to a computer system” to hack data that was very much non-public seems a no-brainer to me and if I was any employee of CA, even if just a coffee boy, I’d lawyer up quickly.

Every time CA’s alleged actions are characterized as “harvesting Facebook data” or as “privacy violations” it’s whitewashing of the probable illegal, unauthorized hacking of a computer system and is playing into the hands of Republican and Russian talking points ...