"This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, or intelligence activity of a law enforcement agency of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or of an intelligence agency of the United States."
18 U.S.C. § 1030(f).
DOJ obtained authorization here, most likely under Fed. R. Crim. P. 41(b)(6)(B)--which, interestingly enough, cross-references the CFAA.
Warrants have always allowed the bypass of physical security devices, why would digital ones be any different?
Edit: After re-reading my post above, I guess I did suggest they violated the CFAA in law. Not my intent to say that. I'll leave it as is.
By default, we expect moral people to conform to the laws of their jurisdiction. Not because the laws are necessarily morally positive; most laws are morally kind of neutral, but because the predictability itself is a good virtue.
Of course, that default presumption can be overcome with a relatively low burden of proof.
Slavery was once legal, and this kind of thinking is what made people want to continue it
Most things that are legal aren't outlined in the law anyway, they're omitted.
So for slavery, you would expect the laws to eg deal with run-away slaves etc, not so much with slavery itself.
> I think it is reasonable to conclude they were referring to the bulk of the law that is administrative/procedural/etc. There are 53 titles of US code, and one of those (title 18) is about criminal code. The rest are predominately not matters of morality.
Yes, exactly. And I am presuming here, that there is a presumption in morality that all-else-being equal, it's more moral to stick to these neutral laws, just because it makes living in a society with other people more bearable.
Eg in a moral sense it doesn't matter whether people drive on the left side of the road or the right side. But if there's a law about driving on the books, you better follow it.
(No clue whether this is strictly speaking something about morals or more about ethics?)
...
> I'm using CFAA as a moral definition of hacking, not legal.
Please don't move goalposts; it degrades the conversation. Better to own the error to let the conversation proceed normally, allowing everyone to learn together. (I doubt most of us knew about the LE carve out, for instance)
Warrants that enable search and seizure on domestic individuals and corporations are...the main expected use of warrants in the US system.
As endpoints of a slippery slope argument go, that's...kind of thr opposite of what you’d usually target.