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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

#121

Post by newfoundglory »

rayiner wrote: post #108
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?

The "older generation" does not use metaphors because they are limited in their thinking. They do it to illustrate the principles underlying law. A basic principle of private property is that you don't have to secure it. The burden is on the would-be trespasser to figure out what rights she has with respect to the property and act accordingly. Snooping around private property out of "curiosity" is illegal, whether or…

> Ordinary law-abiding people don't go fiddling with URLs

I’m an ordinary law-abiding person, and I fiddle with URLs. I know lots of people in that group.

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

#122

Post by gburt »

Please write to CIPPIC [0] and the Members of Parliament [1] and Members of the Provincial Leglisation [2] for both your local jurisdiction if appropriate and Halifax, Nova Scotia to help protect this kid. The federal Minister of Justice [3] and Technology [4] may be good additions. Remember what happened last time we let a government go wild on a kid incrementing a number in a public URL.

The fact is, it is the organization who published "personally identifiable information" on the public internet who should be punished - and, in any case, criminal law is not the tool to do it. The kid who incremented a number in a URL to download that information is not the bad guy. What if the kid was not Canadian? Are you going to try to extradite a Russian national over accessing information on a public web server?

When a server announces to the world that it can answer HTTP requests, making a reasonable number of HTTP requests is, to me and most technologists I know, authorization (and thus, should be seen as with colour of right or non-fraudulent). The fact those HTTP requests released data he was apparently not entitled to is a security issue, a bug, a problem to be paid for by the actor who manages the HTTP server, not a problem of law. Unfortunately, this section of law has not been used often enough to clarify to me the interpretation of those words.

Here are some follow on questions:

- Why was there "personal information" in FOI releases? Surely a FOI release was intended for the public, as that is the intent of the act. Who's fault is it that there was undesired information in the releases?

- How do we get this law changed? As the law is written, it hangs on the words "fraudulently and without colour of right" - the rest of the clause is incoherent babble of a 1985 technophobe.

[0] https://cippic.ca/

[1] https://www.ourcommons.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members/Andy-F...

[2] https://nslegislature.ca/members

[3] http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/contact/index.html

[4] http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/icgc.nsf/eng/h_00279.html

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

#123

Post by rayiner »

newfoundglory wrote: post #121
rayiner wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "older generation" does not use metaphors because they are limited in their thinking. They do it to illustrate the principles underlying law. A basic principle of private property is that you don't have to secure it. The burden is on the would-be trespasser to figure out what rights she has with respect to the property and act accordingly. Snooping around private property out of "curiosity" is illegal, whether or…

> Ordinary law-abiding people don't go fiddling with URLs I’m an ordinary law-abiding person, and I fiddle with URLs. I know lots of people in that group.

You're not. Ordinary people don't even know that you can do that.

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

#124

Post by rayiner »

freshmint wrote: post #21
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 already play with urls that have possible id's in them out of habit. The only difference here is the poor kid was on a gov website and they did not want the information he found to be public. ( Or like in the USA he might have to pay for each document accessed. But I feel that should not result in a raid to his house.) It is a shame the kid was their target and not a google bot like you said.

> I already play with urls that have possible id's in them out of habit

Do you jiggle door handles out of habit to see if they're unlocked? It's antisocial behavior. If you were supposed to have access to that document, it would be accessible from a link or search box on the main site.

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

#125

Post by newfoundglory »

rayiner wrote: post #123
newfoundglory wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ordinary law-abiding people don't go fiddling with URLs I’m an ordinary law-abiding person, and I fiddle with URLs. I know lots of people in that group.

You're not. Ordinary people don't even know that you can do that.

Whether it is common knowledge or not has no bearing on whether it’s criminal, so I wasn’t using ordinary to mean “of normal computer literacy”. If you want to use some specific definitions that turn your claim into something trivially obvious, please define them ahead of time.

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

#126

Post by Declanomous »

ljm wrote: post #90
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 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 pla…

It's not necessarily a problem that the older generation can only think about technology in a metaphorical sense, the problem is that the metaphors they are using are idiotic.

I think, by and large, people are constrained to thinking about things they can describe. To that extent, being able to accurately describe something is meaningful, and is therefore a linguistic issue.

Semantics are very important when you are dealing with minutiae, and the law hinges on comparisons and extremely complex semantic arguments.

To that extent, it makes sense that we argue about the metaphors.

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

#127

Post by gowld »

rayiner wrote: post #108
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?

The "older generation" does not use metaphors because they are limited in their thinking. They do it to illustrate the principles underlying law. A basic principle of private property is that you don't have to secure it. The burden is on the would-be trespasser to figure out what rights she has with respect to the property and act accordingly. Snooping around private property out of "curiosity" is illegal, whether or…

This is absurd. This is not private property. Ordinary law-abiding people do walk into government offices and ask questions, and when they get answers, do continue asking questions and getting answers. Ordinary law abiding people to browse all the products on display at a store. Ordinary law abiding people do flip through all the pages of a catalog that is sent to their home.

This Orwellian attitude that looking at anything is criminal if the government retroactively decides they didn't want you to see it, is terrifying.

But as usual when it comes to authoritarian overreach by government, you're not de-facto wrong about the government sees things, but you are eloquently defending a morally horrific attitude.

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

#128

Post by roywiggins »

rayiner wrote: post #111
clouddrover wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the difference is that a website is built to be publicly accessible on the public internet. Your car, presumably, is not offered as a public resource.

Except this data was obviously not intended to be publicly accessible, or else it would have been reachable from some public-facing portion of the site.

If you are just iterating through an archive, it would be impossible to know whether foo.php?id=24530 was linked to anywhere or not. It seems crazy to criminalize this sort of thing.

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

#130

Post by gowld »

rayiner wrote: post #120
losteric wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be an accurate analogy if these documents were linked to from a publicly-accessible portion of the site. They were not. This is more like someone walking into an unlocked back room and grabbing books that hadn't been shelved.

...which is not a felony, because that would be insane.
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