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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

#81

Post by ebullientocelot »

whack wrote: post #55

This might be a controversial opinion here, but intent does matter. If I see a bunch of stuff sitting the sidewalk and I take some because I think it's free, that's a reasonable thing to do. But going into someone's house and taking their tv is not. "It's their own fault for not locking the door" isn't a valid legal defense, and I would prefer not to live in a country where victim-blaming becomes a get-out-of-jail-fr…

I get what you're saying and I don't disagree with your premise, I just don't think it is applicable in a situation where the purpose of the website he was visiting was to access information. Not _that_ particular information, but if I accidentally put my wife's jewelry out on the curb with the old Nordic Trac it'd be pretty crazy to charge the people who took it off of the curb as jewel thieves.

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

#82

Post by losteric »

eboyjr wrote: post #64
dustingetz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i can see how the older generation is thinking though, they see it like leaving a window unlocked doesn’t mean you can the laws are interpreted and applied by powerful people in a way that suits the way they think - that much i think could have been predicted (but not by a teenager) did the weev ruling surprise anybody other than hackers?

Since it helps the older generation to think about digital content in metaphors, I'd argue that the kid was entering through an open window of a public building. Although a bit strange, no one would give this hypothetical person a third look.

I think the most precise metaphor is: a kid walked through the front door of a public library, borrowed a couple freely available books, then the government realized those books mistakenly included sensitive information.

In order to address that error, 15 police officers raided the kid's house.

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

#83

Post by haser_au »

eboyjr wrote: post #64
dustingetz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i can see how the older generation is thinking though, they see it like leaving a window unlocked doesn’t mean you can the laws are interpreted and applied by powerful people in a way that suits the way they think - that much i think could have been predicted (but not by a teenager) did the weev ruling surprise anybody other than hackers?

Since it helps the older generation to think about digital content in metaphors, I'd argue that the kid was entering through an open window of a public building. Although a bit strange, no one would give this hypothetical person a third look.

It's more like the restricted section of the public library, and they left the door open. He just walked in, and started reading the books on the shelves, and photocopied all of the books.

If there were books in this section that shouldn't have been in there, that's not his fault. That's the librarian's fault.

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

#84

Post by brandon272 »

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #67
dustingetz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i can see how the older generation is thinking though, they see it like leaving a window unlocked doesn’t mean you can the laws are interpreted and applied by powerful people in a way that suits the way they think - that much i think could have been predicted (but not by a teenager) did the weev ruling surprise anybody other than hackers?

It's more like having a 'Please take these unwanted items' bin and sending people to prison when they take something that you mistakenly put in the bin.

A HTTP server may as well equate to a public building with a sign outside saying "Come in and take whatever you want from any room at any time, unless the room's door is locked!" (locked = authentication)

The Nova Scotia govt forgot to lock one of those doors and are now furiously trying to shift blame. I haven't seen them apologize or address their own internal incompetence in any of the news articles I am seeing about this.

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

#85

Post by xexers »

whack wrote: post #55

This might be a controversial opinion here, but intent does matter. If I see a bunch of stuff sitting the sidewalk and I take some because I think it's free, that's a reasonable thing to do. But going into someone's house and taking their tv is not. "It's their own fault for not locking the door" isn't a valid legal defense, and I would prefer not to live in a country where victim-blaming becomes a get-out-of-jail-fr…

I think someone's house is "private by default"... even if the door is unlocked, you know you shouldnt go in there.

The internet is public by default.

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

#86

Post by namlem »

whack wrote: post #55

This might be a controversial opinion here, but intent does matter. If I see a bunch of stuff sitting the sidewalk and I take some because I think it's free, that's a reasonable thing to do. But going into someone's house and taking their tv is not. "It's their own fault for not locking the door" isn't a valid legal defense, and I would prefer not to live in a country where victim-blaming becomes a get-out-of-jail-fr…

The way I see it, these files were sitting on the sidewalk. Public facing websites are public spaces.

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

#87

Post by remir »

cryptoz wrote: post #3

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…

The Gov of Nova-Scotia shut down the site, but you can still find some documents on Google (they're cached).

The subcontractor of the site fucked up and they're blaming this kid.

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

#88

Post by bpchaps »

God dammit. An almost identical thing happened to me after submitting a public records request to Seattle's IT department for email metadata for January 2017. Instead of sending me the email metadata I requested, they ended up accidentally sending me millions of actual emails. FBI investigations, cheating husbands' texts, SSNs, credit cards, zabbix alerts (so many 100% disk space alerts).

When I contacted Seattle them to tell them what happened (on my own will), the conversation quickly turned to a point where we had to get lawyers involved. Basically, they told me that if I agreed to have Kroll [1] scan my hard drives to prove that I deleted the records, then they would give me "legal indemnification". They eventually agreed to accept an affidavit that I deleted everything, and had to wipe TRIM and that I wrote a script to confirm deletion to the effect of, "grep -r $FILES_HEADER_FIELDS /".

One part that led to such a strong action by them was that they didn't see in their logs how I downloaded everything and thought that I found a backdoor to download all of their emails. They had some annoying rate limiting that prevented too many files from being downloaded at once, so I copied the files from the page's source, then ran a wget against everything. Since the files were being downloaded from S3, their webserver logs didn't include most of the downloads, which led to some suspicion.

Funny enough, Seattle told me it would cost $32m and 320 years of employee salary, but I ended up sending them $40.

It just blows my mind.

https://crosscut.com/2017/10/seattle-information-technology-...

[1] https://www.kroll.com/

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

#90

Post by ljm »

dustingetz wrote: post #48
sbarre wrote: post #4

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 poorl…

i can see how the older generation is thinking though, they see it like leaving a window unlocked doesn’t mean you can the laws are interpreted and applied by powerful people in a way that suits the way they think - that much i think could have been predicted (but not by a teenager) did the weev ruling surprise anybody other than hackers?

It feels like the reduction of a nuanced problem into a simple one with a single victim and a single perpetrator, and only one acceptable narrative.

"It's not my fault I left my window open and you took advantage of it. I shouldn't have to keep my windows locked."

"If you see an unlocked window it's not an opportunity for you to take advantage of."

That's admittedly fairly obtuse, but you can see elements of this play out even in this thread, where it becomes a debate about the accuracy of the metaphor and not a discussion of the actual problem. It is so much easier to attack the language than it is to dig out the real concerns and talk about those, so you get a pro and anti situation or semantic nitpicking.

If you agree that the older generation can only think in the metaphorical sense and are practically stuck in the 50s with how they describe it, you also have to accept that it is so far out of whack with reality that it causes continual debate about what actually does reflect the situation and completely detracts from the problem at hand. It is beyond idiotic and it's symbolic of an unhealthy resistance to change.

As an aside, this happens in places like HN and Reddit all the time. A metaphor is introduced into a discussion and it totally derails it, and you're not talking about the source material any more, you're talking about the metaphor and how it can be more accurate. It's like the metaphor is more important than the problem itself sometimes and it's intensely sociopathic, because the linguistics take priority over the humanity.

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