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Adult Website Use At Work Leads To Hacker Conviction
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon May 11, 2009 05:48 PM
from the questions-of-reach dept.
from the questions-of-reach dept.
safesorry notes that several sources are talking about a recent tale of woe about Richard Wolf, a lonely guy looking for love in all the wrong places. Wolf used his work computer to visit the Adult Friend Finder website and upload personal nudes to prospective "friends." Now he's been convicted under a "hacker" law targeted at employees who steal data or access information they shouldn't. "Richard Wolf acknowledged that his behavior was inappropriate when he used his work computer to upload nude photos of himself to an adult web site and view other photos on porn sites, but he didn't think he should be convicted of hacking for doing so."
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It's a typo (Score:5, Funny)
Should be a 'W' not an 'H'
Re:It's a typo (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It's a typo (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly, I need to learn more bash....
unzip; strip; touch; finger; ifup; mount; fsck; more; yes; umount; sleep
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Re:It's a typo (Score:4, Insightful)
Man, I'm glad that we have Anonymous Coward to explain these letter substitutions for us. The funny thing is that in the two ACs here were probably the same guy.
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What the fuck? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is ridiculous.
Re:What the fuck? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. Abusing laws to prosecute people under ridiculous circumstances only serves to undermine those laws and weaken their effectiveness in dealing with the real crimes those laws were enacted to prevent.
Whatever happened to those two girls charged with distribution of child porn for taking pictures of themselves and sending them to their boyfriends? This reminds me of that.
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Re:What the fuck? (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't live in a world where news organizations do follow-up.
There's the sound bite. The 2 minute outrage. Then everyone forgets about it.
Delivering the news is only profitable while the news is still new. Follow-up is just too boring to be profitable apparently.
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Re:What the fuck? (Score:5, Interesting)
Delivering the news is only profitable while the news is still new. Follow-up is just too boring to be profitable apparently.
Then I hereby declare the formation of the 'Olds', which will only do pieces following up on old 'News'.
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Re:What the fuck? (Score:5, Funny)
There'd be an entire domain available for Slashdot dupes to be kept in? That would be awesome! Then CmdrTaco wouldn't need to host them on the main site!
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Re:What the fuck? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bah (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet some people are sending hate mail to a person whose picture was linked to the attacker by a newspaper and othe rpeople with similar names are receiving threaths. HELLO! The guy is DEATH! The moment your hate target answers the phone, and he answers, shouldn't that be a major clue that you got the wrong guy?
No matter what you do, even if you forced newspapers to follow-up or print the complete truth for once, you could never eradicate the idiots.
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Re:Bah (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:What the fuck? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:What the fuck? (Score:5, Informative)
Whatever happened to those two girls charged with distribution of child porn for taking pictures of themselves and sending them to their boyfriends? This reminds me of that.
Nothing, yet.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124026115528336397.html [wsj.com]
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Re:What the fuck? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't think of the word for this, but in the Middle Ages, pretty much any offense past blowing a nose in public was death, and the forms of death got worse and worse. The problem this created was the fact that because something small had such a heavy penalty, might as well be put to death for murder, so this resulted in people feeling they had nothing to lose by going to extremes.
That is a lesson that countries have seem to have forgotten with all these anti-hacker and anti-terrorism laws.
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Re:What the fuck? (Score:5, Interesting)
Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb
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Persecution, not prosecution (Score:5, Insightful)
The case began when Larry Wise, the Superintendent of the Shelby City Wastewater Treatment Plant, where Wolf was employed, was deleting old files from a work computer and found a nude photograph of Wolf.
and
Initially he was suspended while police investigated the case, but was promoted after he returned to work. He lost his job, however, when he was convicted of the charges.
The important question would be why his employer even phoned the police in the first place. This is one of those bizarre situations where it is obvious that the person was persecuted for a lifestyle choice and not for what he did or didn't do at work. As stated in the article, he would not have been prosecuted if he would have looked at horticultural Web sites [and uploaded pictures of flowers].
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Re:Persecution, not prosecution (Score:4, Insightful)
As stated in the article, he would not have been prosecuted if he would have looked at horticultural Web sites [and uploaded pictures of flowers].
Mod parent up! The hacking charge isn't the important thing here, this is! The law is being used in an an unbalanced fashion to persecute someone not because of the crime he committed, but because he doesn't conform to the social norms of the leaders of his community. This is disturbingly close to burning people at the stake because they don't share your beliefs, and should not be tolerated.
This man's life is going to be in chaos for years dealing with the results of this. The question to ask is, is that a fair punishment for someone who uploaded flower pictures from work?
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Re:Persecution, not prosecution (Score:5, Funny)
As stated in the article, he would not have been prosecuted if he would have looked at horticultural Web sites [and uploaded pictures of flowers].
Unless he worked for Monsanto.
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Re:Persecution, not prosecution (Score:5, Insightful)
The statements you make (many of which are completely bogus and worthy of a Troll Moderation) do not necessitate the involvement of law enforcement (in this particular situation).
You have to know why the photograph was on your system. You have to know how it was being used.
I question the whole rationality of your statement (without trying to sound like a Troll, but just merely using Logic). I will elaborate; you do not have to know why a naked picture of an employee is on a companies computer system. Of course it is an oddity, and probably something that should be taken up my management and not by law enforcement. Nude photographs of adults are not illegal (or even of minors, necessarily, but that would be a tangent). Nude photographs of oneself are not even immoral (you need to trust me here and have some faith. Presumption of innocence isn't just a legal matter).
You can't take the man's word as gospel.
Of course not. Most people lie, but I always give people the benefit of the doubt unless or until I observe evidence to the contrary. It would be fair to presume that this supervisor is not a legal expert and probably only made the worst assumptions. I doubt if this supervisor would have realized that merely going to a Web site (and interacting with the people on it) that was not directly related to company business was illegal; hence the abusive nature of the supervisors behavior. Considering that (from what I've read from the article at least) nothing illegal could possibly be presumed (without going out of the way to consult a an aggressive lawyer with courtroom ambitions), nothing of a criminal nature should or logically could have been presumed. This is (at least) an over-reaction, and in a Democratic society shouldn't have even been given consideration by the courts (the abuse of the law here apparently trumps my assertions however).
You need answers and you need them now.
No offense, but that's a Bullshit statement. I need answers now all the time when I deal with the incompetency, immorality, and illegality of all the companies and bosses I have ever worked for. Of course I'm on the ass-end of the Totem-pole and the pecking order so my righteousness and logic will always get me fired and without job references. Your statement is unfounded.
The mayor won't be pleased when a secretary files a ten million dollar lawsuit for sexual harassment.
This is definitely a red-herring Troll. I will "risk" being down-modded by stating this. So be it. There is no evidence of sexual harassment here. There is however, implications of a fishing expedition on behalf of Management.
He will be even more unhappy when your man is arrested by the feds for soliciting minors on online
Another Troll. I will go out of the way and state that you should be down-modded because you are going out of your way to suggest unsubstantiated illicit behavior. The person who up-modded you should be punished through meta-moderation.
and he'll be really - royally - pissed off if comes out later that you tucked the photograph away and did nothing.
Another Troll. Use some logic. You are advocating fishing expeditions and witch hunts. You are an Asshole. I say this not out of spite, but merely as an observation. I will let the Moderators judge me.
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Re:Persecution, not prosecution (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in non-freak country he'd probably be pulled aside an quietly disciplined for "misuse of company reesources" at most. Even in sue-happy sexually repressed US I figured it would be nothing more than a firable offense. Going from "found a nude picture" to "maybe soliciting minors online" isn't just jumping at conclusions, it's taking the Grand Canyon leap. So if I'm looking up baseball bats online, you'd better make sure I'm not planning to beat the ex-gf to death with it? Because like, that's so like the usual way the use a bat mmkey? The whole post and moderation makes me glad I don't live in the US, though of course I got other annoyances...
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Stupid Law (Score:5, Interesting)
This is ten steps worse than I thought from the summary, though. The court decided that any use the company decided was felony 'hacking', at the companies discretion through the application of its internal policy, without requiring the company to actually install blocks against the usage!
Let's let businesses come up with new felonies on the fly! Woo!
Re:Stupid Law (Score:5, Informative)
FTFA: David Carto, the attorney who handled Wolf's appeal, told Threat Level that Wolf was prosecuted because authorities disapproved of the material he viewed online.
"The reason he was prosecuted was clearly because of the content of what he was looking at," he said. "If somebody else had been on an internet site studying horticulture, I don't think he would have been prosecuted. It was not obscene. It was just something that was not approved of by certain elements of the city government and by the court in which he was tried. The prosecutor and the judge both treated this basically as a sex offense."
So I read this that the judge and prosecution couldn't find an adequate sex offense charge, apart from consulting a dominatrix which is a misdemeanor, so they hit him with the best they could which happened to be the poorly worded anti-hacking law.
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Re:Stupid Law (Score:5, Funny)
"If somebody else had been on an internet site studying horticulture, I don't think he would have been prosecuted.
He was studying whore-to-culture... isn't that close enough?
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If Lawyers and Judges don't like it its criminal. (Score:4, Insightful)
Lawyers (that includes Judges) can do anything they want to you and get away with it. They have erected a multitude of laws and offenses. You are going to be guilty of at least one even if they have to stretch it like they have here. One more reason the break their Guild.
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Re:consulting a dominatrix is a misdemeanor? (Score:5, Informative)
dominatrix != prostitute as usually there is no actual sex involved, hence prostitution laws do not apply.
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Re:consulting a dominatrix is a misdemeanor? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly you don't understand the difference between a professional dominatrix and a prostitute who simply dresses up and gives a light spanking.
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Re:consulting a dominatrix is a misdemeanor? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually my wife and I are lifestylers. A bullwhip is just one of the many toys in our collection.
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Re:Stupid Law (Score:4, Interesting)
So he spent less than 1 hour of a 8 hour day surfing porn (5 work days in a week x 4.34 weeks in a month [google.com] x 5 months = 108.5). That's not hard to do....
Here's the WTF part:
"He said his client was a good worker and had even been promoted after his supervisors found the pictures. Initially he was suspended while police investigated the case, but was promoted after he returned to work. He lost his job, however, when he was convicted of the charges."
sounds like a huge fishing expedition, who'd he piss off in gov't? Was the mayor's daughter the dominatrix?
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Re:Stupid Law (Score:5, Insightful)
Extrapolate that policy to it's finality. A company can decide at any time to change their policy and any use they don't agree with, pornographic or not, becomes a felony.
Watch out /.ers, it's a felony to browese at work now.
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Re:Stupid Law (Score:4, Interesting)
Scenario: You want to fire an employee, and you really hate him to boot. Solution! Find a website he visits, change the policy, and send out a long rambling copy of the full policy that no one reads anyway, wait a month, get him jailed.
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Re:Stupid Law (Score:4, Insightful)
Quoted from the appellate court's opinion [wired.com]:
Upon review, we find that the crux of the state's "unauthorized use" case was based on the proposition that Appellant was acting outside the scope of his authorization to use the computer by engaging in criminal conduct, i.e. soliciting prostitution.
This wasn't so much about this guy sending naked pictures of himself as it was about him using his work computer to set up a rendez-vous with a dominatrix. The court determined that this was pretty obviously outside the boundaries of what you might reasonably expect to be able to do with your work computer.
/. at work. Then we'll have an interesting case. :)
That said, it's troubling that a misdemeanor (solicitation) can get double-whammied into a felony because it's done on company time, and that that's apparently at the company's discretion. And the potential for abuse is there. It doesn't look like the guy advanced constitutional vagueness arguments (probably because this isn't a great case for that). Eventually someone will be fired for surfing
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Re:Stupid Law (Score:5, Informative)
The idea that if someone does something you don't like, they have to be punished, even if you can't find a law that exactly names the thing you didn't like as a crime, is moronic.
I'll take that a step further: It's evil. Using the law as a bludgeon and a personal retribution device instead of as a scalpel to rid society of true cancers is simply evil.
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Just fire him (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just fire him (Score:4, Informative)
No company. He was working for the state, the "Shelby City Wastewater Treatment Plant".
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Re:Just fire him (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Just fire him (Score:5, Funny)
And thus, it is our responsibility, as the voters who elected the folks who set that policy. Well, assuming we live in the same state.
I work for a state government, too. The voters evidently don't want us spanking it on their dime. Wasting time on Slashdot is fine, it seems, because the filters let me come here, but sausage polishing (or fingering the sushi, I guess...) is a no no.
If you want to spank it on the taxpayer's dime, do it in a bathroom stall like the rest of us.
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Re:Just fire him (Score:4, Funny)
"If you want to spank it on the taxpayer's dime, do it in a bathroom stall like the rest of us."
Senator Larry Craig, 2007
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Re:Just fire him (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah. Those sites are banned because:
1) it clearly isn't work related.
2) everyone is afraid of sexual harassment laws.
and, let's not forget:
3) people will accept just about any conditions of employment.
Cause we're all slaves.
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Most of us are criminals (Score:5, Insightful)
Every geek worth his geek-badge has bypassed the company web-filter. According to this law, that's hacking. That whole "theft of services from office" part was overturned but only because they couldn't show his work had actually suffered from his actions.. whereas if all you do at work is post on Slashdot and your work suffers, you could be charged with a crime.
So yeah, basically, if you have an employer who is a big enough dick, most of us are criminals.
FTA... (Score:5, Informative)
"They had crafted one but they hadn't published it," he said. "So there was in effect no policy and no protections on the computer -- no password protection or filtering of any kind -- so basically anybody could access anything on the internet through the city's computer."
And the statue he was convicted under:
"No person, in any manner and by any means, including, but not limited to, computer hacking, shall knowingly gain access to, attempt to gain access to, or cause access to be gained to any computer, . . . without the consent of, or beyond the scope of the express or implied consent of, the owner of the computer, . . . or other person authorized to give consent."
Righto.
I fully agree with Rasch. (Score:5, Insightful)
WHENEVER your Congresscritters -- or eve City Council -- want to pass a law that is too broadly worded, oppose it. I did once, and was told "It will never be enforced that way." My reply was, "If it is not intended to be enforced that way, why was it written that way?"
When you give the government power to do something, eventually it will... even if that was not your intent. So make sure the intent is clear, and just do not give them powers that you do not intend them to use.
Confused from the start (Score:4, Funny)
I am still stuck at step one...
They found a nude picture of an employee on a work computer and...call the cops?
The cops and DA must be awfully friendly with the treatment plant bosses, i can't imagine calling that in from work here and getting any kind of coherent response from the cops. Especially as they didn't care about the employee that stole nearly $10,000 in merchandise because they couldn't 'prove' it. (apparently any one is likely to have a stack of adult diapers, foam bed pads, 20,000 latex gloves, etc in their garage just like their employer...)
is it just me (Score:5, Funny)
or is work the last place I want to have a boner
"can you stand and give your presentation"
ummm... no.....
I was caught hacking at my desk (Score:4, Funny)
Coworkers thought I was coughing up a lung. Damn cold.
Uploading naked pictures, sounds familiar (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked at a company of about 40 men and 2 women. One of the women was the owner's wife, the other was the receptionist.
The receptionist was a "geek girl" and hung out on some overclocker forums, and so did a bunch of the guys. This girl decides it would be fun to post naked pictures of herself on this forum. The guys totally fell for the bait and started inviting guys who were not on this forum to come over to their computer and have a look. This went on for a few days and eventually my supervisor happened to get invited to take a peek.
No-one really considered that my supervisor was a part owner in the company. I mean, they knew, but they never really thought that he would be more interested in protecting his stake in the company than being "one of the boys". He was shocked that these idiots were passing around naked pictures of a fellow employee (they weren't but hey, close enough) so he went straight to the boss. The forum was blocked.
Everyone who had looked at the pictures was suspended for a week without pay. One of them complained about this, saying that they didn't put the pictures on the site, that this girl did, and why wasn't she being suspended? He was told to drop it, wouldn't, so he was fired.
Later, they had a quiet word with the girl and recommended she not come back after xmas.. and she agreed.
Thankfully the courts were not involved.
Sexual harassment laws make hostile workplaces.
"Authorization" (Score:5, Insightful)
DMCA uses the same trick. Circumvention (a thing you're never allowed to do) is defined as bypassing blah blah blah "without authorization."
Which sort of almost makes sense, except that the body that makes this law, isn't the party that grants/denies authorization, nor sets up a regulatory agency to do so. It's a third party, a private party. Who decides if you may or may not bypass a technological measure that limits access? Who decides when you can upload a nude picture of yourself? Not the government, not the people's elected representatives; they haven't prohibited or allowed either activity. Someone else decides.
BTW, the decision of granting/denying authorization need not ever even be communicated. It's bad enough that reading the legislation and case law won't tell you whether an act is illegal; the party who decides whether it's illegal or not, need not even tell you. In this particular case (uploading nudie pics to a hookup site), it seems .. well .. obvious that the user wasn't authorized to use the computer for that (though I guess sometimes "obvious" is in the eye of the beholder), but the end of TFA talks about how the policy was drafted but not distributed -- yet it was still enough for a conviction.
You might think that the safe thing to do, is always assume you don't have authorization to do something, unless you know that you do. Surely that makes sense, right? Nope. Look at any of your DVDs. Does a single one of them say you're allowed to bypass the protection? Every DVD player, even the DVDCCA-licensed ones, bypasses the protection. What you don't know, is whether that's circumvention or not -- whether your act of bypassing the protection was authorized or not. Millions of people have played DVDs. These things are for sale in mainstream brick'n'mortar stores. And if push comes to shove, no one who has ever used one, can prove they didn't break the law. All the copyright holder has to say, is "That wasn't authorized" and the case is open and shut.
Back to computer abuse acts: are you authorized to load example.com's page on someone else's computer? You probably don't know, and common sense might not help you.
When will you find out? When you ask what crime you've just been charged with. By then, it's too late. They came after this guy for uploading nudie pics. Piss them off, and they can get you for loading example.com's web page.
Congress has effectively ceded political power (!!) by letting these third parties, not Congress themselves and not the courts, decide whether a criminal act has occurred.
And we call this "law." Wow.
wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, reading this stuff just really pisses me off.
It's just like that Lori Drew case, This case seems to be yet another attempt at turning corporate policies into defacto laws - it's an element of encroaching corporatism (aka fascism); except I don't think this guy is a real piece of shit; where Lori Drew certainly seems to be, but I still think she never should have been charged - certainly violating a website's TOS is NOT a crime.
I think people need to really fight against these cases and precedents because the selective abuse of vaguely written overly broad laws like this for political purposes is starting to get out of control ...And there is a small part of me that thinks somebody needs to show the "Shelby Ohio Wastewaste Treatment Plant" what hacking really is; so that they fucking KNOW they've been hacked and will never make the mistake of confusing someone doing what a fairly large percentage of employees do all over the world with HACKING again......
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember- jury nullification is a right our founding fathers supported.
The appropriate answer to questions about jury nullification belief is "No" (because they really shouldn't be asking you that question in the first place and answering "Yes" would remove your right of nullifcation.
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Re:NEWS: Public employee fired for not working! (Score:5, Informative)
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