## Facts

- Shaunna Briles provided Chad Powers (defendant) with the password to her America Online (AOL) email account.
- Before Powers’s conduct at issue, Briles had emailed another person images of herself partially nude and in provocative poses.
- Using Briles’s password, Powers accessed prior email messages in Briles’s AOL account.
- Without Briles’s authorization, Powers sent the images from Briles’s email account to people in Briles’s address book and to other recipients.
- Briles contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and told a special agent that three email messages were sent from her AOL email account and that her sister received one of the messages at her work email address.
- The special agent obtained copies of the email messages and attached images from Briles’s sister’s supervisor.
- The FBI’s analysis indicated the emails originated from an IP address registered to Cox Communications.
- Cox Communications responded to a subpoena by confirming the IP address belonged to Powers.
- The United States charged Powers with intentionally exceeding authorized access to a computer and thereby obtaining information from a protected computer, in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C).
- Powers moved to dismiss the CFAA count, arguing Congress did not intend § 1030(a)(2)(C) to protect personal computers.
- At an evidentiary hearing, the manager of computer systems for the federal public defenders’ office testified that email accounts store email messages and attachments on servers, and that the images Powers sent were located on the server rather than on Powers’s personal computer hard drive.

## Issues

1. Whether conduct involving access to and retrieval of emails and attachments stored on an email provider’s servers can support a charge under 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C), notwithstanding the defendant’s argument that the statute was not intended to protect “personal computers.”
2. Whether the indictment’s CFAA theory is legally sufficient when the “information” obtained consisted of personal images stored in the victim’s email account and transmitted without authorization.

## Decision

- The court denied Powers’s motion to dismiss the CFAA count.
- The court treated the emails and images stored in the AOL email account as information obtained from a “protected computer” within the meaning of § 1030(a)(2)(C), based on the storage of messages and attachments on servers used to provide email service.
- The court allowed the prosecution to proceed on the theory that Powers exceeded authorized access by using Briles’s credentials to retrieve and distribute stored emails and attachments without her permission.

## Legal Principles

- Under 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C), the government must allege that the defendant intentionally accessed a computer without authorization or exceeded authorized access and thereby obtained information from a “protected computer.”
- Email systems commonly store messages and attachments on remote servers; accessing stored emails and attachments can constitute obtaining information from the computer system that hosts that data.
- A defendant’s use of valid login credentials may still constitute “exceed[ing] authorized access” when the access or subsequent use is beyond the scope of permission granted by the account holder.
- A motion to dismiss a CFAA charge that challenges the statute’s reach may be denied where the charged conduct involves accessing data stored on networked servers used to provide email service and transmitting that data without authorization.

## Conclusion

In *United States v. Powers*, the court refused to dismiss a CFAA charge where the defendant used the victim’s AOL password to access stored emails and attachments on the email provider’s servers and then transmitted private images to others without permission, concluding the indictment could proceed under § 1030(a)(2)(C) on an “exceeds authorized access” theory involving information obtained from a protected computer.


United States v. Powers, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34007 (2010)