Thread by @nabihasyed

Today, the Supreme Court will hear a case about an old hacking law from the 1980s. Interpreted the wrong way, this law — the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — threatens journalism you love.

I mean, who wants to know *less* about the technology that shapes everything we do online?

The power of reporting lies in our devotion to hard facts. This was true in the days of Ms. Ida B Wells-Barnett, and it’s true now.

These days, we just have more tools to collect facts — and for data journalists, that means “scraping” data from websites that we all use.

At @themarkup we use tech to investigate tech. Scraping lets us analyze more data at scale — think about how long it would take to review 100,000 webpages manually!

So scraping helps take our analysis beyond anecdote, which is good. Unless you don’t like independent reporting...

And that’s where the anti-hacking law comes in. That law, the CFAA, gives private companies a way to go after people who are scraping data from their websites — including security researchers and journalists like our folks at The Markup.

What’s particularly terrifying about the CFAA is that there’s a criminal aspect to it, too. So the stakes are very high for anyone using commonplace data journalism techniques to investigate websites or social platforms!

As a media lawyer, I’m not a big fan of giving powerful actors a way to bully journalists.

So we wrote to SCOTUS about why our newsgathering techniques @themarkup should not be made illegal by overbroad data security laws. @DWTLaw @katembolger

More: supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/19/1…

Our message to SCOTUS today is simple:

For journalists, Scraping is Not a Crime.

#scrapingisnotacrime