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Of Course Our First Space Hack Is So Banal And Human

Family law in space is a lot like family law on Earth.

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[image via Getty]

Obviously, when I think of space hacking, I think like a full on James Bond villain. I imagine an evil genius circumventing all Earthly firewalls to manipulate global currencies. I imagine a megalomaniac reprogramming the world’s nuclear arsenal to give themselves full control from their space lair on the dark side of the Moon.

I do not imagine a spurned lover checking in on her spouse’s bank accounts during a bitter divorce. But, of course, our weak and petty species would use the God-like power of space habitation to check in on whether their ex bought a new car. That’s humanity: a species not ready to join the intergalactic community (if there is one) because we are still easily consumed by our own materialistic problems.

From the New York Times:

Summer Worden, a former Air Force intelligence officer living in Kansas, has been in the midst of a bitter separation and parenting dispute for much of the past year. So she was surprised when she noticed that her estranged spouse still seemed to know things about her spending. Had she bought a car? How could she afford that?

Ms. Worden put her intelligence background to work, asking her bank about the locations of computers that had recently accessed her bank account using her login credentials. The bank got back to her with an answer: One was a computer network registered to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Ms. Worden’s spouse, Anne McClain, was a decorated NASA astronaut on a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station. She was about to be part of NASA’s first all-female spacewalk. But the couple’s domestic troubles on Earth, it seemed, had extended into outer space.

Ms. McClain acknowledged that she had accessed the bank account from space, insisting through a lawyer that she was merely shepherding the couple’s still-intertwined finances. Ms. Worden felt differently. She filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and her family lodged one with NASA’s Office of Inspector General, accusing Ms. McClain of identity theft and improper access to Ms. Worden’s private financial records.

Goddamnit. It’s not even an interesting jurisdictional issue. If McClain had hijacked a Star Destroyer and laid waste to Worden’s new Camry from space, like that would at least be a thing. Does GEICO cover that or do death beams from low Earth orbit constitute an act of God? This is just boring-ass alleged invasion of privacy. It doesn’t matter that McClain is accused of doing it from space, you could get busted for invasion of privacy is you do it from Phuket, once you are back in U.S. jurisdiction.

The Times does raise a potential issue with discovery, because it’s likely that NASA’s email protocols on the International Space Station are subject to highly classified security that far surpass the kinds of protections your bank offers you for online banking. But even there, I mean this case is not what a kid has in mind when she dreams of “space discovery.”

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We’ll get there. More people are going into space, and that means more stupid things will happen in space, and eventually something will happen that will be both interesting and totally illegal, but for the fact that it happen in space.

NASA Astronaut Anne McClain Accused by Spouse of Crime in Space [New York Times]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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