Law / United States / 
Wisconsin
Wisconsin computer crimes statute
In force.
A computer misuse rule binding public and private bodies.
- Obligation class
- Access restriction
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- Ordinary, non-disruptive automated access to a public Wisconsin-connected computer, program, or system does not by itself violate this statute; the offense requires acting willfully, knowingly, and without authorization, and doing one of the listed acts (modifying, destroying, accessing, taking possession of, or copying data or programs, or disclosing restricted access codes).
- Intentionally flooding a computer, program, system, or network with messages that exceed its processing capacity, causing an interruption in service, is a separate offense under this statute regardless of whether any data is altered.
- The base offense is a Class A misdemeanor; committing it to defraud or obtain property raises it to a felony, and it rises further where the resulting damage exceeds $2,500, causes a public-service interruption, or creates a substantial risk of death or great bodily harm.
- Disguising the identity or location of the computer used to commit the offense, with intent to avoid identification, increases the maximum fine and imprisonment on top of the underlying penalty.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
If you get it wrong
Criminal exposureYes
Criminal exposure note
Subsection (2)(b): a violation of the data and programs offense is a Class A misdemeanor (fine up to $10,000 or imprisonment up to 9 months, or both) unless a felony tier applies: a Class I felony (fine up to $10,000 or imprisonment up to 3 years and 6 months, or both) if committed to defraud or obtain property; a Class F felony (fine up to $25,000 or imprisonment up to 12 years and 6 months, or both) if the offense results in damage valued at more than $2,500, causes an interruption or impairment of governmental operations, public communication, transportation, or a public utility supply, or creates a substantial and unreasonable risk of death or great bodily harm. Subsection (3)(b), the parallel offense against computers, equipment, or supplies, uses the same Class A misdemeanor base and Class I felony fraud tier, but its property-damage tier is a Class H felony (fine up to $10,000 or imprisonment up to 6 years, or both) for damage greater than $2,500, with the same Class F felony tier for a substantial and unreasonable risk of death or great bodily harm. Subsection (2)(c) separately allows the court to increase the maximum fine by up to $1,000 and impose up to one year in county jail (for a misdemeanor), or increase the maximum fine by up to $2,500 and the maximum imprisonment by up to 2 years (for a felony), where the offender disguised the identity or location of the computer used to commit the offense with intent to avoid identification.
Penalty structure
The $25,000 figure is the fine ceiling for a Class F felony under Wis. Stat. § 939.50(3)(f), the highest of the felony and misdemeanor classes this statute imposes; that tier also carries imprisonment up to 12 years and 6 months. Lower tiers cap the fine at $10,000 (Class A misdemeanor, Class I felony, or Class H felony, the last applying only to the equipment-and-supplies offense under subsection (3)). Section 943.70(2)(c) separately allows a court to increase the maximum fine on top of any of these tiers, by up to $1,000 for a misdemeanor or $2,500 for a felony, where the offender disguised the identity or location of the computer used to commit the offense; that discretionary increase is not included in the $25,000 figure. The fine amounts by felony and misdemeanor class are set by the general sentencing statutes, Wis. Stat. §§ 939.50 and 939.51, not by section 943.70 itself.
- Rule
- Fixed only
- As of
- Currency
- USD
- Fixed cap
- 25,000
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 943.70 makes it an offence to willfully, knowingly and without authorization modify, destroy, access, take possession of or copy data, programs or supporting documentation, to disclose restricted access codes, or to cause an interruption in service, and separately to damage computer equipment. It imposes no duty to create, keep, produce or review a log or record. Subsection (4) lets a judge restrict an offender's use of computers and subsection (5) allows injunctive relief; neither is a record duty. The section states no territorial clause, so no hook is recorded.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Subsection (2) makes it a crime for any person, willfully, knowingly, and without authorization, to modify, destroy, access, take possession of, or copy data, computer programs, or supporting documentation, or to disclose restricted access codes or other restricted access information to unauthorized persons; a separate paragraph, (2)(am), criminalizes intentionally causing an interruption in service by submitting a message or messages that exceed a computer, program, system, or network's processing capacity.
Subsection (3) parallels this for the underlying computer, computer equipment, or supplies themselves.
"Access" is defined broadly in subsection (1)(ag) to mean to instruct, communicate with, interact with, intercept, store data in, retrieve data from, or otherwise use the resources of a computer, which reaches ordinary automated retrieval; but because a violation additionally requires acting willfully, knowingly, and without authorization, ordinary access to a public, unauthenticated page that performs none of the statute's listed acts does not fit its elements.
No Wisconsin case has applied this statute to a scraping or automated-collection fact pattern specifically.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has construed subsection (2)(a)6's phrase "access codes or other restricted access information" narrowly: it refers to the codes, passwords, or other information that permits access to a system or to programs or data within it, not to the system, program, or data accessed, and the statute was not meant to criminalize disclosure of information obtained with authorization in the first instance (Burbank Grease Services, LLC v. Sokolowski, 2006 WI 103, 294 Wis. 2d 274, 717 N.W.2d 781).
A Wisconsin appellate decision has separately held that the statute is constitutional and that federal copyright law does not preempt a prosecution under it for destroying data entered into a computer program (State v. Corcoran, 186 Wis. 2d 616, 522 N.W.2d 226 (Ct. App. 1994)).
The section was created by 1981 Wisconsin Act 293 and has been amended several times since, most recently by 2015 Wisconsin Act 300, which amended the definition of "property" at subsection (1)(h) to include digital property as defined elsewhere in the statutes. No day on which 1981 Wisconsin Act 293 came into force has been located.
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