Researchers should be free to look for bias in website algorithms in the future. A federal court in DC has ruled in a lawsuit against Attorney General William Barr that studies aimed at detecting discrimination in online algorithms don’t violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The government argued that the Act made it illegal to violate a site’s terms of service through some investigative methods (such as submitting false info for research), but Judge John Bates determined that the terms only raised the possibility of civil liability, not criminal cases.