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Michigan Man Charged with Reading Wife's Email
Leon Walker has been charged under a Michigan statute that prohibits persons from accessing computer systems without authorization. Mr. Walker read his wife’s email without permission, logging into her Gmail account using her password. In so doing, he discovered that she was having an affair with her second husband. Mr. Walker, who is the woman’s third husband, notified her first husband of the affair because he was concerned about the second husband’s history of abuse involving a child of the woman’s first marriage.
The prosecutor of the case has called Mr. Walker a “hacker”. The defence has stated that the computer was a family computer that Mr. Walker used routinely, and that his wife’s passwords were stored in a small book kept next to the computer. The case will be one of the first to apply laws originally conceived to prevent true computer hacking in the context of a domestic relationship. If convicted, Mr. Walker faces up to five years of incarceration for this offence.
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