Andrew Auernheimer was convicted in November 2012 of violating the CFAA. His crime was that he visited an att.com webpage (a URL that *you* could have visited). When he noticed the URL gave out the email addresses of AT&T's customers, he notified Gawker, a news organization. Today, March 18, 2013, he was sentenced to 41 months in prison + 3 years supervised release + $73k in restitution to AT&T for their costs of "direct mailing" to notify their customers that AT&T had leaked their email addresses.
The CFAA criminalizes violations of the "terms of service" that any website can post. This is a horrible mechanism, and should have never happened. If a website's "terms of service" says you must stand on one foot while reading (and you don't), you too can get 4 years in prison.



