The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Attorney General of the United States, asking the court to declare a section of a 1980s-era anti-hacking law as "unconstitutionally overbroad."

In the case, known as Sandvig v. Lynch, the ACLU argues on behalf of First Look Media Works and four professors who want to deploy bots and fake profiles to study possible racial discrimination in online advertising for housing and employment. The researchers haven't been able to proceed because they're afraid of being sued or prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

The ACLU's civil complaint points to examples in the media and in academia suggesting that such biases and unlawful practices may already be ongoing.

While examining such an important issue would be no problem in the analog world, the researchers argue that when it's done online, they may be violating the terms of service of the target websites and may run afoul of the CFAA. Nearly every such site explicitly prohibits scraping, crawling, and other similar tactics.

There have been a number of recent high-profile CFAA criminal prosecutions, including Matthew Keys Chelsea Manning , and the late Aaron Swartz . An effort to reform that law has languished in Congress.

The plaintiffs claim that this particular section of the CFAA, 18 US Code § 1030(a)(2)(C), violates the First and Fifth Amendments.

Lead ACLU lawyer Esha Bhandari told Ars that her organization doesn’t know how many other academics have chosen not to pursue research for fear of prosecution. "We're not aware of any researcher being prosecuted, but the federal government has not disavowed prosecutions based on terms of service or others," she told Ars. "The CFAA is so broad, it's available as a tool to use. We don't think any researchers or journalists should be prosecuted under that provision."