Company alleges SCA, Wiretap, and CFAA claims against former VP

In Exec. Sec. Mgmt. v. Dahl, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 132538 (C.D. Cal. 2011), The APEX Group (an event security firm) alleges that former employees (one was a VP and board member) made misrepresentations that caused them to lose a contract with the PGA. The ten claims include violations of the SCA, Wiretap Act, and the CFAA. The defendants moved for summary judgment.

The SCA claim is the most interesting. Apex argues two violations - unauthorized access to e-mail and deletion of information on Apex laptops. The latter argument was struck down because defendants had not "accessed a facility," among other issues. However, defendants argue that they were administrators of the Apex e-mail accounts. The issue at hand is whether they, as administrators "with authorization to access the facility, ... accesse[d] unauthorized information." Thus, summary judgment was denied on the e-mail issue.

The Wiretap Act claim appears to be based on defendants setting up their cell phones to download e-mails from accounts not their own through a POP3 account. The court denied this to be "interception" under the statute because the e-mails were not "halt[ed]"; they simply read "emails not intended for their eyes."

With the CFAA claim, Apex argues that defendants used an "erasure program" to delete information from company computers. To satisfy the mandatory $5,000 damage requirement, they argue that this violation ultimately caused the PGA to terminate its relationship with Apex at a cost of over $118,000. As noted here, CFAA damages can be hard to demonstrate, but the court decided to send both arguments to the jury.

This case has nothing extremely profound in it (though the VP being the e-mail administrator presents an interesting question). But if you are interested in learning the basics of these three statutes, Judge Snyder does an excellent job of explaining how these claims work.