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Divorce spyware case moves forward

By Evan Brown

Court refuses to dismiss ECPA, SCA and CFAA claims against ex-spouse accused of delivering malicious code.

Becker v. Toca, No. 07-7202, 2008 WL 4443050 (E.D. La. September 26, 2008)

Plaintiff Becker sued his ex-wife, one Ms. Toca, claiming that Toca installed on Becker’s home and office computers a Trojan Horse that could steal passwords and send them to a remote computer. Becker claimed violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Stored Communications Act (SCA), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and Louisiana’s Electronic Surveillance Act.

Toca moved to dismiss for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. The court dismissed the Louisiana state claim, but allowed the federal claims under the ECPA, SCA and CFAA to move forward.

In denying Toca’s motion on the ECPA claim, the court nodded to the general consensus established by cases such as Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, 36 F.3d 457 (5th Cir. 1994), United States v. Seiger, 318 F.3d 1039, 1047 (11th Cir. 2003), Konop v. Hawaiian Airlines, Inc., 302 F.3d 868 (9th Cir.2001), and Bailey v. Bailey, 2008 WL 324156 (E.D. Mich. 2008) that ECPA liability requires the electronic communication to be intercepted contemporaneously with its transmission. Toca had argued that merely sending the Trojan Horse could not be considered an “interception” of an “electronic communication” under the ECPA. But the court held that allegations of stealing the passwords and transmitting them elsewhere, in conjunction with Becker’s computers being connected to the Internet, made it “reasonable … to infer that the Trojan Horse program may have collected information contemporaneous to its transmission.”

As for the SCA claim, Toca had argued Becker’s allegedly infected computers were not “a facility through which an electronic communication service is provided,” and thus not within the protection of the SCA. The court declined to dismiss the claim at the pleading stage because it was unclear to what extent the Trojan Horse may have accessed or retrieved information stored with an electronic communication service provider.

The court denied the motion to dismiss the CFAA claim, rejecting Toca’s arguments that the affected computers were not “protected” computers under the CFAA, and that the allegations were insufficient to show Toca intended to cause “damage.” The allegations that the Trojan Horse caused error messages and slow processing were sufficient on this point. Toca argued that an intent to damage the computers would be incompatible with a desire to retrieve information from them. But the court rejected this all-or-nothing damage approach.

The Louisiana statute claim failed simply because the court held that the statute covered only wire and oral communications, leaving electronic communications of the type at issue within the case outside its scope.

Full post as published by InternetCases.com on October 21, 2008 (boomark / email).