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Ronald Reagan signed CFAA into law. Fed prosecutors had been seeking broad authority to punish "hacking" and had drawn up an absurdly broad definition of cybercrime that would give them latitude to go after anyone they didn't like.

They wanted to define hacking as "exceeding your authorization" on a computer that didn't belong to you. Even in the mid-1980s, legal and technical scholars recognized the potential dangers of a definition this broad, but not Ronald Reagan.

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