FBI raids dental software researcher who discovered patient data on FTP server

> I was told by the county IT administrator "Did you ever stop to think if maybe this information was public for a reason?"

Absolutely jaw-dropping.

People's reactions to this kind of thing just blow my mind. If you are about to walk away from your car, having parked it in a high-crime area, and a passerby points out to you that you haven't locked it, do you call the police and have them arrested for looking into your car? If they were going to steal your car, would they have told you about it???

My wife ran into this back in 2001 or so. She had visited some Web site and noticed that the URLs followed a familiar pattern -- I think related to the Microsoft Access database. She wondered if some internal files were accessible via paths analogous to those she'd seen on the intranet where she worked. Sure enough, they were. She told the company about it, and of course they yelled at her.

Unfathomable.

Not necessarily. I've spent the last few years fighting various hacking charges in Finland and will most likely continue to do so for several years to come.

The law enforcement here will consistently take anything the FBI tells them as a fact, even when the information provided by them has been consistently shown to be false or even maliciously fabricated.

I spent 3 months in jail in 2014 because the FBI emailed the Finnish NBI and alleged that I had perpetrated various attacks against large US tech companies, they provided some information vaguely connecting me to the crimes and claimed to have further evidence they'd deliver shortly. They requested that the Finnish police arrest me and seize my equipment, they did so without question.

Based on that single contact from the FBI the Finnish NBI held me in jail for 3 months and banned me from using the phone or in any manner communicating with anyone outside the jail. After the 3 months had passed the FBI had still failed to deliver any evidence, and the Finnish police had failed to discover any. In fact, they had unquestionably discovered heaps of evidence against the aforementioned allegations since the very day they arrested me. Just a few days before Christmas they were forced to very reluctantly release me.

Now it's 2016 and I just recently got a letter stating that most of those charges have been dropped as the FBI has failed to deliver the promised evidence. I've also received letters informing me of various covert surveillance techniques utilized against me after my release. These are supposed to require an even higher standard of proof than keeping someone in investigative custody, but obviously they're hard to contest when you aren't told about them.

Incompetent fucks desperately hoping to score big wins for their careers or with personal vendettas are hardly an US only problem, but at least in the US I could've fought the FBI in court. That's hardly an option here. The only thing that's better here are the sentencing policies.

Unless there is more to the story, he won't be prosecuted for accessing an anonymous FTP server. However, they will scour the computers/drives they took (for months or possibly even years), looking for evidence of this or any other technically illegal misdeed. In the unlikely event they find nothing that they can take issue with (this being a security researcher's computer equipment, they'll find all kinds of hacking tools and possibly evidence of other research that could be construed as hacking attempts), in a year or so, he might get his stuff back. If they find anything, he'll face charges for that.

That's how law enforcement in the US works. A crack in the door, in the form of a ridiculous accusation, is all it takes for one's life to be destroyed.

You could search PGP keyservers for email addresses/domains of the local media where that retirement fund is located and take it from there, using your own judgment about the reporter and outlet, and how much you'd want to mask that communication.

Unless they put a banner at the top after you login that says "This server is private blah blah blah"