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criminal law essay
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Exam of 3 pages for the course Law at Aston (Full essay)
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Is the Computer Misuse Act (1990) Appropriate?The Computer Misuse Act was created to aid the prosecution of technological
related crimes, commonly known as hacking. The most prominent case was R v
Gold and Schifreen, where Robert Schifreen and Stephen Gold accessed British
Telecom’s Viewdata service by “shoulder surfing” an engineer’s username and
password. The credentials were very simple; this brought about concerns as to the
integrity and security of computer system access. The pair were prosecuted under
the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981 and received a relatively small penalty –
fined £750 and £600 respectively. This case threw into light the lack of legislature
regarding crimes of this manner, and so the CMA was created.
Hacking is defined in Section 1 of the CMA as, “unauthorised access to any
programme or data held in any computer”. This definition is moulded such that
external hackers like Schifreen and Gold can be prosecuted easily. However it has
not been as simple in other cases such as Ellis v DPP (No 1). In this case an ex-
student was using other student accounts that had been left logged in in order to
access computers in the campus library. It was argued whether it could be deemed
unauthorised under section 1. Lord Woolf CJ however said that the access was still
unauthorised and that statutory provisions were sufficiently wide to include use of the
computers; Ellis was prosecuted under section 1 of the CMA.
The question “what is unauthorised access?” has been a cause of concern for many
cases under section 1. The key early case was DPP v Bignell [1998] Div. Ct. in
which married police officers accessed the police database in order to find the car of
an ex-lover. Accessing the database was not unauthorised, but their use of it was
and they were found to be guilty. Other cases that contributed confusion were, R v
Bow Street Magistrate and Allison, ex parte US Govt [1999] HL, R v Ashley Mitchell
2011 and R v Cuthbert 2005 Mag Ct.
The media and other critics applied a lot of pressure for change. The government
accepted the All-Party Internet Group’s recommendations and section 1 became
triable in either way, which was an amendment from section 35 of the Police and
Justice Act (PJA) 2006.
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