From: Randy 

(from comp.risks):

Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 00:20:55 -0800
From: Scott Peterson 
Subject: It's now a crime to delete files

What: International Airport Centers sues former employee, claiming use of a
secure file deletion utility violated federal hacking laws.

When: Decided March 8 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit
Outcome: Federal hacking law applies, the court said in a 3-0 opinion
written by Judge Richard Posner.

What happened, according to the court: Jacob Citrin was once employed by
International Airport Centers and given a laptop to use in his company's
real estate related business. The work consisted of identifying ``potential
acquisition targets''.

At some point, Citrin quit IAC and decided to continue in the same business
for himself, a choice that IAC claims violated his employment contract.

Normally that would have been a routine business dispute. But the twist
came when Citrin dutifully returned his work laptop--and IAC tried to
undelete files on it to prove he did something wrong.

IAC couldn't. It turned out that (again according to IAC) Citrin had used a
``secure delete'' program to make sure that the files were not just
deleted, but overwritten and unrecoverable.

In most operating systems, of course, when a file is deleted only the
reference to it in the directory structure disappears. The data remains on
the hard drive.  But a wealth of programs like PGP, open-source programs
such as Wipe, and a built-in feature in Apple Computer's OS X called Secure
Empty Trash will make sure the information has truly vanished.

Inevitably, perhaps, IAC sued. The relevance for Police Blotter readers is
that the company claimed that Citrin's alleged secure deletion violated a
federal computer crime law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

That law says whoever ``knowingly causes damage without authorization'' to
a networked computer can be held civilly and criminally liable.

The 7th Circuit made two remarkable leaps. First, the judges said that
deleting files from a laptop counts as ``damage''.  Second, they ruled that
 Citrin's implicit ``authorization'' evaporated when he (again, allegedly)
chose to go into business for himself and violate his employment contract.

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