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Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website

cbc.ca

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Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website

#3

Post by cryptoz »

Wow. The trauma inflicted upon the children in the family when the Canadian government bursts into their house can never be undone or taken back. Nor can the financial and mental, emotional stress of losing their computers and ability to do productive work and go to school. (Edit: will there be any reparations for this abhorrent behaviour? Have they apologized? Will they, at least? Not that it matters, the damage to this entire family is done.)

Some questions. Is the website still online? What happens if every Canadian downloads the files?

What a dystopia. Do we only have one part of the story, can the situation really be as bad as depicted on the article? This is atrocious.

Edit: And where is the case against the people in the office who put the sensitive information of others into public view, (assuming and against the law), the actual perpetrators of an actual crime?

Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website

#4

Post by sbarre »

This reads like the beginning of The Hacker Crackdown..

As a Canadian, reading this article made me angry. If the information is not supposed to be public, it should not be reachable without authorization or authentication.

Never mind a curious 19-year-old, there are tons of crawlers and indexers out there that attempt to enumerate URLs where they think there might be other content.

Shame on them for building a poorly secured site, but even more for trying to railroad a curious kid who made them look stupid.

Re: Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website

#6

Post by j32fun »

Since this is publicly accessible, what would be the chance that search engines indexed the files? In this case, would Google bot be charged? Or if this were, say, Equifax or Facebook. I mean, in those situations, the companies were blamed for "the leak". It seems rather convenient to cherry pick the law to apply on this poor teenager.
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