Acidus wrote:

On Thursday, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California announced that Lori Drew, now 49 years old, was indicted on conspiracy and hacking charges. The indictment charges Drew, a resident of O'Fallon, Missouri, with three counts of unauthorized access by violation of MySpace's terms of service and one count of conspiracy.

There is a good write up over at The Volokh Conspiracy by Orin Kerr and I highly suggest you read it.

I have a bit of a different perspective on this. I agree with Kerr that this has nothing to do with the TOS, but I still think its fraud.

If you call an operator up on the phone, tell her you're a phone company employee, and ask for some internal bit of telco information, this is telephone fraud, and its illegal.

Replace the telephone with the Internet, the operator with this girl, phone company employee with a cute boy, and the internal bit of telco information with dirt on the perps daughter, and what, exactly, is the difference? You've used a false pretense to con someone out of information. Its a crime, and I think they'll get a conviction on it. I also think people will blow it out of proportion. I don't think it means what everyone else seems to think it means.

RE: MySpace Suicide Indictment: or TOS violation = crime