Felten, Ed. “Does the Great Firewall violate U.S. law?” Freedom to tinker, June 28, 2006.

Summary: The mechanisms that the government of China uses to prevent Chinese Internet users from getting access to Web sites of which they disapprove may be violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, if the sites are served from computers located in the United States. The Chinese government programs each of its boundary routers to send a forged TCP Reset packet to such a site whenever it detects an outgoing request from a user inside the boundary. This TCP packet asks the Web server to drop the virtual connection established by the initial request.

Felten argues that deliberately forging large quantities of Reset packets and sending them to the same computer seems to constitute a denial-of-service attack, and thus an “impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information,” as specified in the law he cites.