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Teenager facing prison for downloading unsecured files from government website

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

#371

Post by sandebert »

rayiner wrote: post #175
hug wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor analogy. What he was doing (incrementing an ID to access a series of files) is more like leafing his way through a filing cabinet. A filing cabinet that was ostensibly filled with public-access files, and he was told he was allowed to be in the filing cabinet. So while going to the filing cabinet to get the file he'd been directed to, he leafed through other files too. Why not? They're all public information, si…

If someone told you that you could get a specific file from a filing cabinet, it would be antisocial of you to start flipping through the other files to see what was in there.

I'm not saying that I agree with you, but I'm curious: does antisocial behavior mean it's illegal?

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

#372

Post by wwweston »

rayiner wrote: post #259
jolmg wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A link is not someone giving you permission, it's merely telling you where something else is. I can't think of how you even came to this conclusion. It's like you have this incredibly restricted view of the internet, limited to people clicking on a browser, and think that's enough for protecting files. It's not. You don't seem to realize how bad of an idea this is. You're talking about making criminals of people. You…

I have a view of the Internet where “protecting files” has nothing to do with whether access to files is authorized or not. I shouldn’t have to lock my door, and I shouldn’t have to lock down my web server. (It may be prudent to do those things, but a trespasser shouldn’t escape penalty just because I didn’t do those things.)

There's understood conventions for when doors can/should be opened. There's also understood conventions for when it's OK to access a resource served over HTTP.

If the response code is 200, it's OK. The response code (not to mention the transmission of the file) is literally permission from the system to have the resource.

If you don't want someone to come in your door, don't put up a sign that says "come in."

If you don't want someone to see a resource at a URL, don't send them a 200 response code or serve the resource. That's the convention for the web.

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

#373

Post by Nickg00617 »

Just like Aaron Swartz. Is it really necessary to send 15 officers and / or sentence people to 20+ years in prison for downloading freely available information?

Aaron Swartz faced a longer prison sentence than most murderers within the US, and the sentence for murder in almost any other country in the world.

Common sense has completely gone out the window in both policing, and the criminal justice system.

Was anyone injured? Did anyone suffer financial loss? Fear to self? Any form of significant damage at all? The answer to all the previous questions is a definitive and resounding NO!

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

#375

Post by ScottBurson »

rayiner wrote: post #169
jopsen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No OP has a point, we shouldn't talk in metaphors so much... It's not necessary. The web is in many ways a huge collection of resources that reference each other. Some of these references are explicit in links, others in text, and some are available for programmatic access. In fact many resources can be discovered by programmatic access, and there is no inherent reason to think this is wrong. Just because an API isn'…

> In fact many resources can be discovered by programmatic access, and there is no inherent reason to think this is wrong. Just because an API isn't documented doesn't make using it illegal. The license to access private property is based on the intent of the property owner. Where the intent is made express (through a sign), that governs. Where the intent is not made express, we try to figure out what a reasonable pe…

> Where the intent is not made express, we try to figure out what a reasonable person would infer about the property owner's intent.

We do. But if we fail to do so correctly, as people occasionally will, have we committed a serious crime for which we should be facing prison? Particularly in a case where societal custom is not well formed, and analogies to more familiar situations are all strained?

This young man, by his account, likes to archive stuff he finds on the Web. From the sound of it, he's done URL incrementation many times, and this is the first time he's gotten in trouble for it. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that that's true, and also that there really were no indications on this site that the information was unintentionally left accessible. Do you really want to send him to prison for that?

You might reply that as cruel as that seems, its deterrent value would make it worth doing. But I don't even want to live in a world where people without criminal intent are so succesfully deterred from experimenting with the Internet. In such a world, site owners would take even less responsibility than they do now for securing their information, and therefore actual criminals would have even more unfettered access to it.

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

#376

Post by oarsinsync »

rayiner wrote: post #172
doomtop wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you might be thinking of an anchor element. People ask for the "link" when they mean the URI all the time.

Wikipedia disagrees: > In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow either by clicking, tapping, or hovering. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks. The text that is linked from is called anchor text. A software system that is used for viewing and creating hypertext is a hypertext…

If it helps, the Oxford English dictionary has updated the definition of “literally” to literally include “used for emphasis while not being literally true.”

Whether we like it or not, language evolves. If “literally” can, then literally any other word can too.

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

#377

Post by realusername »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #234

I find the his story of "archiving the Internet" extremely amusing. Good luck with that defense. He was 19 at the time and knew exactly what he was doing - or should I say "archiving". He estimates he has around 30 terabytes of online data on hard drives in his home, the equivalent of "millions" of web pages. He usually copies online forums such as 4chan and Reddit, where posts are either quickly erased or can become…

You are not providing any argument against why he should not do that.

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

#378

Post by logicallee »

lysp wrote: post #323
walrus01 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just surprised they didn't "redact" the documents by drawing black boxes over top of text in the Adobe Acrobat PDF editing tool... If their web presence is that clueless it seems like exactly the sort of thing that would happen. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/05/pdf_radacting...

Something similar happened in Australia last year. Federal Government ministers all have their phone bill summaries released as part of public record with private information removed. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/how-hundreds-of-parliamentary-mo... The contractor redacted the phone numbers in this instance by changing the font colour to white (same as the background) in the PDFs uploaded to the government disclosure w…

>Federal Government ministers all have their phone bill summaries released as part of public record with private information removed

Why?

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

#379

Post by hazeii »

FundThrowaway wrote: post #318

From the article: "When he was around eight, he remembered playing around with the HTML of the Google search page, making the coloured letters spell out his name." Isn't the Google logo an image? Smells a bit fishy to me.

I make that about 11 years ago - the page was rather different then.

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

#380

Post by john_minsk »

rayiner wrote: post #259
jolmg wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A link is not someone giving you permission, it's merely telling you where something else is. I can't think of how you even came to this conclusion. It's like you have this incredibly restricted view of the internet, limited to people clicking on a browser, and think that's enough for protecting files. It's not. You don't seem to realize how bad of an idea this is. You're talking about making criminals of people. You…

I have a view of the Internet where “protecting files” has nothing to do with whether access to files is authorized or not. I shouldn’t have to lock my door, and I shouldn’t have to lock down my web server. (It may be prudent to do those things, but a trespasser shouldn’t escape penalty just because I didn’t do those things.)

Th website had "Freedom of Information" sign at the top....
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