Legal case brief regarding cyber law.

1. United States V. Batti Case Brief
Matthew J McMahon
The defendant was convicted of illegally accessing restricted information from a former
employer’s computer network. Batti appealed the districts court ruling on the grounds
that the crime didn’t meet the subsection (iii) requirement of a felony liability charge.
Subsection (iii) of the felony liability statute comes from the 1996 amendment, 18 U.S.C.
2314, similar in nature to the transporting stolen goods statute that requires a “value” be
placed on stolen goods. To meet subsection (iii,) this value must exceed $5,000.
The challenge to the district court’s ruling is over how the court placed a value on the
data that was unlawfully obtained. In this case Batti contends that as the value of the
goods cannot be accurately measured then subsection (iii) of the felony liability
requirement is not met.
In the case of felony liability to warrant this charge only one of three requirements must
be met; (i) the offense was committed for purposes of commercial advantage or private
financial gain; (ii) the offense was committed in furtherance of any criminal or tortious
act in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States or of any state; or (iii) the
value of the information obtained exceeds $5,000. In the case of the United States V.
Batti, based on the specifics of the case, the only subsection the prosecution could have
argued was (iii.)
In this case the defendant, Batti attempted to argue that because the information he
obtained illegally did not have an easily discernable “street value,” the prosecution could
not viably argue subsection (iii.) The prosecution countered that wherein a stolen good
does not have a “readily ascertainable market value, any reasonable method may be
used,” to determine the approximate value. In this case unfortunately for the defendant
the plaintiff presented a fairly solid “reasonable method,” for calculating the value of a
certain piece of the data that was stolen by the defendant and then posted to an open
source website. This one piece of stolen goods was a commercial that Campbell-
Ewalds, the victim spent $305,000 on producing. The prosecution’s argument was that
if this one piece of data can be estimated at $305,000 alone the total value of the stolen
goods was over $5,000 which met the subsection (iii) necessity.
The findings of the district court that Batti was guilty of felony liability having met
subsection (iii) were upheld by the appellate court as the prosecution used “reasonable
means” to value the data breach at over $5,000.