Law / United States / 
Alabama
Alabama Digital Crime Act, Computer Tampering
In force since .
A computer misuse rule binding public and private bodies.
- Obligation class
- Access restriction
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- Ordinary access to a public-facing Alabama website is not, by itself, computer tampering; a violation requires acting without authority or exceeding authorization of use, and separately doing one of the eight listed acts such as altering, damaging, disclosing, taking, or disrupting a computer, program, or data.
- Because exceeding authorization of use is defined as using access you do have to obtain or alter information you are not entitled to obtain or alter, do not use a login or other legitimate access to a computer, computer system, or network to take or alter data beyond what you are authorized to take or alter.
- Penalties escalate with harm: the base offense is a Class A misdemeanor, an unlawful-benefit or defraud intent raises it to a Class C felony, a victim loss over $2,500 or interference with a government or utility service raises it to a Class B felony, and a victim loss over $100,000 or physical injury raises it to a Class A felony.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
In the frameworks
- NIST AI RMF
- MAP 4.1Approaches for mapping AI technology and legal risks of its components – including the use of third-party data or software – are in place, followed, and documented, as are risks of infringement of a third party’s intellectual property or other rights.
- NIST AI 600-1
- GAI-RISK-09Information Security
- GAI-RISK-12Value Chain and Component Integration
- OWASP LLM Top 10
- LLM03:2026Excessive Agency
- OWASP Agentic Top 10
- ASI03Identity and Privilege Abuse
- MIT mitigations Draft
- FINOS AIGF
- AIR-PREV-018Agent Authority Least Privilege Framework
- AIR-PREV-023Agentic System Credential Protection Framework
- ETSI EN 304 223
- 5.1.2-6Access the AI system gets to other systems and data sources is minimal and risk assessed.
Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law
Identifiers refer to ETSI EN 304 223 V2.1.1 (2025-12), © ETSI 2025, all rights reserved. ETSI owns the standard; no ETSI text (titles or sentences) is reproduced here. The standard is free to download from ETSI.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Criminal exposure note
Base offense is a Class A misdemeanor; a Class C felony where intent is to defraud, benefit, or harm; a Class B felony where victim expenditure exceeds $2,500, an intended interruption reaches a government or utility service, or the violation touches Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center or Alabama Justice Information Commission data; a Class A felony where victim expenditure exceeds $100,000 or the violation causes physical injury to an uninvolved person.
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Ala. Code 13A-8-112 makes computer tampering a crime when a person who acts without authority, or exceeds authorization of use, knowingly does one of the eight listed acts, with penalties graded by intent and harm. It imposes no duty to create, keep, produce or review a log or record. Subsection (c) lets a prosecution be tried in the county where the victimized or used computer, or an affected service or infrastructure resource, is located, which is a venue rule within Alabama and not a territorial hook.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
A person who acts without authority or who exceeds authorization of use commits computer tampering by knowingly doing one of eight things: accessing and altering, damaging, or destroying a computer, program, or network; altering, damaging, deleting, or destroying data; disclosing, using, controlling, or taking programs, data, or documentation; introducing a virus; disrupting or denying computer or network services; preventing a user from exiting a site or connection; obtaining confidential information or non-public records from a government or medical computer system; or giving out a password or other security credential without consent.
Exceeds authorization of use is separately defined as accessing a computer with actual or perceived authorization and then using that access to obtain or alter information the accessor is not entitled to obtain or alter.
The base offense is a Class A misdemeanor; it rises to a Class C felony where the actor intends an unlawful act, benefit, defraud, or harm; to a Class B felony where a victim's expenditure exceeds $2,500 or the intended interruption reaches a government or utility service, and separately where the violation touches Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center or Alabama Justice Information Commission data; and to a Class A felony where a victim's expenditure exceeds $100,000 or the violation causes physical injury to an uninvolved person.
This statute replaced the prior Alabama Computer Crime Act (1985), whose intellectual-property offense provision was repealed by the same 2012 Act.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web.
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