In 1987 the Court dealt a death knell to the denialofservices fraud doctrine, limited the mail and wire fraud statutes to protection of tangible property rights and challenged Congress to fix the problem if it wished to do so.
The recent rash of distributed denial-of-service attacks on large American banks has disrupted the delivery of banking services to consumer and commercial customers over the Internet for hours at a time.
The denial came a week after Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA and ordered it to reject an application from Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.
It is a new twist on so-called denial-of-service attacks, in which hackers overload financial-services websites with information in order to crash them.
At the SIFMA securities conference June 15, two panels on social media and financial services revealed a world of confusion, contradiction, wishful thinking, denial and regulators lagging behind developments.