Blogger Fined €3,000 for 'Publicizing' Files Found Through Google Search 248
mpicpp points out an article detailing the case of French blogger Olivier Laurelli, who had the misfortune to click links from search results. Laurelli stumbled upon a public link leading to documents from the French National Agency for Food Safety, Environment, and Labor. He downloaded them — over 7 Gb worth — and looked through them, eventually publishing a few slides to his website. When one of France's intelligence agencies found out, they took Laurelli into custody and indicted him, referring to him as a 'hacker.' In their own investigation, they said, "we then found that it was sufficient to have the full URL to access to the resource on the extranet in order to bypass the authentication rules on this server." The first court acquitted Laurelli of the charges against him. An appeals court affirmed part of the decision, but convicted him of "theft of documents and fraudulent retention of information." He was fined €3,000 (about $4,000).
Hacker??!! (Score:5, Insightful)
You fsckup your own security then blame the guy for accessing and republishing something you posted for the world to see?! Stupid bureaucrats.
Re:Hacker??!! (Score:4, Interesting)
French law and government is just simply fucked. There really isn't a better word to describe it.
They try to legislate all kinds of stupidity and it nearly always backfires on them. Just take a look at all the laws they've passed to improve employment in their country. Laws that fine employers for layoffs (guess how that turned out? Hint: all sane companies just laid off a bunch of people before the law came into effect and have less desire to hire anyone else), price fixing of books in a futile attempt to save bookstores, taxing the shit out of any company in an effort to fund a spendthrift government, it goes on and on.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.... [blogspot.ca]
The constant meddling has driven so many companies from their country, it just puts them in the hole even further. Speak out against any of the stupidity and rather than attempting to smarten up, they'll try to fine you. What a disaster. It's no surprise they came up with this dreadful verdict.
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Thing is. In the US you can be tried twice for the same crime. It all depends on how far the prosecutor (and you) want to push things. This is what various appeals courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court are.
In the US, you can be convicted in absentia as well. Take Andrew Luster [wikipedia.org] as an example.
Also, you CAN be interrogated without a lawyer present. Reread the Miranda Warning again.
- You have the right to remain silent when questioned.
- Anything you say or do may be used against you in a court of law
Re:Hacker??!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Thing is. In the US you can be tried twice for the same crime. It all depends on how far the prosecutor (and you) want to push things. This is what various appeals courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court are.
nopee. the first court is the only court that hears matters of fact, i.e. evidence, witnesses, etc. all the appeals courts only hear matters of law, i.e. whatever. further, if the defendant wins a court case, the prosecutors can't appeal. So, no you can't be tried more than once.
In the US, you can be convicted in absentia as well. Take Andrew Luster [wikipedia.org] as an example.
The supreme court has ruled over and over and over again that people have the right to be present at trial, and if a trial happens without them it is a violation of due process protections. Congress codified this in 1946 to lay out specific protections and enumerate specific exemptions. One exemption "the defendant waives his or her right to be present if he or she voluntarily leaves the trial after it has commenced". Your dude Andrew Luster bolted from the trial and fled the country. He got sentenced anyway.
You sir are my chief pedant of the peasant's pedant brigade. USA is an exceptional nation.
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"nopee. the first court is the only court"
Tell that to the "Liberty City 7", that group of destitute morons that the FBI conned into becoming "terrorists". The charges and evidence were so laughable that two separate juries wouldn't vote to convict. It took a third, hand picked jury to finally convict some of them of some of the charges after two weeks of deliberations and two uncooperative jurors being replaced.
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FREE AMANDA KNOX
If they're free, I'll take two.
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It's fundamental to all of Europe, and a huge freaking problem. Look at Amanda Knox â" interrogated without a lawyer, tried twice for the same crime, and convicted without being present in court. Thank goodness we have the Bill of Rights! Those founders really thinking something good two hundred years ago.
My understanding is that Amanda Knox is a very good looking woman who brutally for no other reason than her own pleasure killed another person. Not being in court when she was convicted was obviously her own decision.
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I agree that European law is rough (this coming from an American)
Especially Norwegian law [theguardian.com]. ;p
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In American CIVIL courts, money is king, and often the side with the most money wins. In CRIMINAL court, it is a bit different. One side is always the government, the other is you. There are tons of protections in place.
Where it gets fucked up in the US is Federal criminal law. State criminal law is pretty straight forward, but your protections in Fed cases is greatly reduced. The vast majority of cases are State, not Fed.
Ask Ed Rosenthal, who was convicted of being this mass marijuana producer.....bec
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Guantanamo is a fucked up situation, and it is being used for the wrong reasons in many cases, however, it does prove the fact that if you are on US soil, the government can't do those things to you under the law. Otherwise, Guantanamo wouldn't be used to begin with.
Old problem (Score:2)
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The mistake he made was knowingly publish documents that didn't belong to him and which he knew weren't supposed to be publicly available. If you read the article, the only information the authorities had in the beginning was that someone had documents they should have had and that the IP address used to access them was foreign (Panama, because of his VPN). They then traced that back to him which looked awfully suspicious. They had no idea he simply stumbled upon them through a Google search. So at first th
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I don't understand why every business doesn't just pull out of France altogether. It can't be worth staying in a place where the government does everything in the absolute dumbest way possible. Whenever I hear of American government stupidity stories I remind myself that at least I don't have to live in France.
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A - Accessing a system fraudulently. That means that you know the system is protected and you don't have the rights to access it, but you still do
B - Maintaining your access to the site while you know that you shouldn't access the site
C - Preventing the site from working properly (deny of service)
D - Modifying, adding or removing some data from the site
The blogger was not indicted for A (he just clicked
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So if I leave my front door open, that gives you the right to barge in and take stuff from my refrigerator?
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A bad analogy: if I take a bottle of milk from the refrigerator then it is no longer in it. If I copy some pages from a web server they are still there for someone else to look at.
A better analogy would be that I looked into the refrigerator and told the world what sort of cheeses you liked.
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Re:Hacker??!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey!
The world wide web was designed to make accessible via hyperlinks (URLs) a whole bunch of documents / generated content. Key word being accessible. If someone is stupid enough to put documents intended not to be public on the public world wide web, that's their issue.
It is not a transgression on the part of the person who used the URL to access the content, doing nothing more than the technology is explicitly designed to do.
This is just another example of judges who got an A in social studies and a C in technical subjects making asinine rulings about use of technology they don't understand.
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The world wide web was designed to make accessible via hyperlinks (URLs) a whole bunch of documents / generated content. Key word being accessible.
HTML was designed as a hypertext markup language, and the web evolved around it. It wasn't designed for everybody to be able to access every document, and it certainly wasn't designed for everybody to be able to republish every document. Even if it was, that doesn't mean it has to be used that way.
If someone is stupid enough to put documents intended not to be public on the public world wide web, that's their issue.
Even if somebody is stupid, they don't lose the protection of the law. Again, this isn't some weird fascistic "might is right" country.
It is not a transgression on the part of the person who used the URL to access the content, doing nothing more than the technology is explicitly designed to do.
Repeat of incorrect origin; repeat of origin fallacy.
This is just another example of judges who got an A in social studies and a C in technical subjects making asinine rulings about use of technology they don't understand.
Well, as someone with an
Re:Hacker??!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok I'l give you another analogy.
This is pretty much like leaving a stack of pamphlets on a table in a train station, then arresting those who pick one up for possession of classified material.
I can't make it any clearer: Content that is behind a URL in a publicly searchable server directory, with no password or secure session protection, has been placed in plain sight in public. There is no fault in accessing it, nor in republishing it (posting the pamphlet on the door of your house) unless it contained an explicit copyright restriction statement.
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This is pretty much like leaving a stack of pamphlets on a table in a train station, then arresting those who pick one up for possession of classified material.
That's pretty much exactly how classified material works. It doesn't matter how you got the information, or even whether you should have access to it. What matters is whether you followed proper security procedure with it, including labeling.
It's strict by design. Otherwise, a spy could copy classified information, remove the labeling, and just leave the information on a table for an accomplice to pick up. That accomplice could then undertake the risky operation of transporting the documents, but with littl
Re:Hacker??!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah this isn't a "door was left open" scenario. That scenario is more comparable to network infrastructure without a password on it like ssh. There is a door, but it's been left unlocked. This wasn't even a house (private network) this was a public place.
In the scenario we're talking about the object was both left in a public place and said public place was referenced in another. I can't think of anything analogous to the real world, but real world analogues only cloud judgement.
The bottom line is this had to be in a directory literally called "public_html" or the equivalent for IIS/Nginx. This folder, and it's contents, are shared with everybody. Not only that, but the URL was advertised in an unspecified public place. This URL was also indexed by google.
Further there were 7GB worth of files..plural..so directory listing was on. This is DIRECT EVIDENCE that the French prosecution/government is simply spinning things.
"In their own investigation, they said, "we then found that it was sufficient to have the full URL to access to the resource on the extranet in order to bypass the authentication rules on this server."
Obviously he didn't need the full URL if he was able to wget 7 gigs worth of text and/or pdf files. If he was able to download the entire directory there was no authentication mechanism to be bypassed, and the only offense by the French government is farcical. This has a double impact, as it also proves this was conclusively NOT an extranet by definition.
So if I was the defense I would say:
1) The "open door" example is intentionally (and obviously) misleading and biased, and that's probably the exact analogy they used. It seems like that analogy gets used in all court cases.
2) There is clear intent by the person who designed the server to make said documents public information. The intent is proven by a very simple fact: the site has been crawled by google. Without a robots.txt google will not crawl your site (at least these days.)
As this file must have been created and configured intent couldn't be any more clear.
3) To further prove the intent of the French administrator the files were (most likely willfully and knowingly) placed in a directory specifically marked for sharing files.
4) Laurelli never bypassed (or even provably encountered) any authentication mechanism whatsoever.
5) The French government's argument is non-unique as these documents were already made "public for advertising or promotional purposes" when indexed by google, and this claim is supported by google's own mission statement:
google's mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
google's mission statement (by it's own admission) is to make the world's (what they choose..via indexing) information universal. This is obviously for promotional purposes of google and would fall neatly into the definition of "publicizing." So by crawling google announced their intent to publicize the documents, and by indexing said documents as step 1, we have both a provable intent and provable action moving towards publicizing the documents at hand. The next step in publicizing after indexing is of course to wait for users to access and share the content. This is exactly what my client did (teehe I couldn't resist).
In summation it is very clear cut that there is indeed only 1 victim here...but there are 2 villains in this story. The first (and lesser at least under French law) was the network engineer/admin who either misrepresented his/her ability, got lazy, or was grossly negligent.
The second, and greater villain, and the true perpetrator of this crime was google. For the intent of gaining profit using the French government's documents (which google indexed to grow their search database) in the pursuit of adding content for their userbase in an effort to grow said userbase and profit via advertising targeted to it's users.
Mr Laurelli is the clear victim of both goo
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What gives?
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There is a difference between a hyperlink and storing the files on your own server. In the former case, the files can simply be denied access once the problem is discovered. In the latter case, the files are still available and are not in control of the owners.
To make your analogy more correct, it's like he made a photocopy of sensitive material and left it on the train table station. That's wholly different from leaving a note on the table stating where to find the original copy... at that point it is o
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He sent a "GET /some_document.html HTTP/1.1" request to a web server run by the French National Agency for Food Safety. The web server, acting per procurationem for the agency, sent him the "secret" document. If I ask you, "Can you give me $10?" and you give me $10 dollars, you can't run around and claim that I stole $10 from you.
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You don't even have to RTFA to see that the court, and the appeal court, threw out the charge relating to downloading the documents. The only charges that stuck were related to reproduction, something that is illegal in one way or another in most places.
What's wrong with, actually RTFA and then bringing up facts on /.? You've been around here ling enough to now that's not how /. works.
Seriously, he also admitted after he got the documents that he went to the home page and discovered it required authentication and thus new the documents were meant to be protected. As you pointed out, the court didn't take issue with his stumbling upon the documents but what he did after he apparently realized they were not meant to be publicly accessed.
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Re:Hacker??!! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's insane to try to prosecute the downloader. My 6 year old loves to watch youtube videos.
Alot of the words she knows how to spell like 'dora' and 'mickey mouse' are copyrighted.
How is she (or her grandma or anyone else) suppose to know that video A is ok to watch
but video B (which youtube is still getting ad revenue from) is copywrited and illegal.
Honestly half the time I can't even tell. I assume that full length movies on youtube
(yes there are quite a few, my kids stumble upon them all the time) are illegal but youtube
does a terrible job of enforcing it on all but the most popular movies and there is tons
of gray area as I'm assuming some of the shows like the disney ones are probably
actually licensed but then again even some of those have poorer quality and might
be bootleg. Prosecuting the downloader especially if the provider is someone like
google or youtube is like prosecuting someone because walmart sold them a bootleg
dvd.
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It's insane to try to prosecute the downloader. My 6 year old loves to watch youtube videos. Alot of the words she knows how to spell like 'dora' and 'mickey mouse' are copyrighted. How is she (or her grandma or anyone else) suppose to know that video A is ok to watch but video B (which youtube is still getting ad revenue from) is copywrited and illegal.
Ignorantia juris non excusat. Throw her and her granny in jail, they're criminals [youtube.com].
</sarcasm>
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It's insane to try to prosecute the downloader.
How the fuck else do you propose to revive feudalism/fascism - prevent the peasants from owning guns?! :p
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Re:Hacker??!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because you CAN do something, it doesn't mean it's okay to do it. This creates a horrible survival-of-the-fittest arms race techno-bureaucracy where values are absent.
In this case, when a PUBLIC agency violates their own security protocol, and turns over all its internal documents to the internet, it means EXACTLY that it is OK to do so.
Your analogy of walking into an unlocked office fails the sniff test. (not to mention the stupid analogy test).
He did not break. He did not illegally enter. There was no door. He didn't deprive them of anything. The documents might as well have been stacked neatly in the public park, with signs and arrows pointing to the juicy bits.
The government agency already published the documents.
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Re:Hacker??!! (Score:5, Informative)
In the absence of any keep out signs, (there weren't any), even in France, public items are for free for public consumption.
The only strawman around here is you, and you seem to have most of it in your head.
This guy did nothing wrong. The documents were freely available on the web. There was no security on the site, and no copyright on the documents.
As he states on TFA:
Through a Google search which strictly did not have anything to do with ANSES or with public health, I found myself in the ANSES extranet. Simply by clicking on a search result.
First observation: there are a lot of documents freely available here.
Second observation: they speak about public health.
Third observation: L’ANSES is a public establishment.
Question: Is it that this ought to be public?
Response: (too) obvious at the time: yes.
And he was acquitted!!! But an embarrassed agency appealed..
Re:Hacker??!! (Score:5, Informative)
In the absence of any keep out signs, (there weren't any), even in France, public items are for free for public consumption.
The only strawman around here is you, and you seem to have most of it in your head. This guy did nothing wrong. The documents were freely available on the web. There was no security on the site, and no copyright on the documents.
As he states on TFA:
The article has an update posted:
UPDATE: Laurelli ended up admitting in testimony that when he found the documents, he traveled back to the homepage that they stemmed from and found an authentication page. This indicated that the documents were likely supposed to be protected. That admission played a part in his later conviction in the appeals court.
In other words, he admitted to the court that he deliberately attempted to determine if the documents were intended to be publicly accessible or not, and had determined *to his own satisfaction* that they were likely not intended to be made public. That's probably why he was not acquitted on the basis of the documents being public. They were, to an uninitiated person. But Laurelli actually knew what he was doing and admitted to the court that he himself believed the documents were not intended to be publicly accessible. So while he thought they "ought to be" public, he also knew they were not intended to be. So by his own admission, he had the requisite intent to steal them from people who did not want them taken.
It seems the lower court acquitted him because all they knew was he got the documents through a public search, and did the right thing by acquitting him. And the appeals court also did the right thing in upholding that acquittal. What they convicted him of was the different crime of retaining and disseminating those documents *after* he realized they were not intended to be public.
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Re:Hacker??!! (Score:4, Insightful)
and no copyright on the documents
Copyright is automatic, you don't need to state it explicitly for it to apply. That's why downloading movies from TPB is perfectly legal but redistribution without permission is not.
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That's why downloading movies from TPB is perfectly legal but redistribution without permission is not.
Downloading from TPB can still get you in trouble if you are using a normal bittorrent client.
Bittorrent does tit for tat swapping so unless you set it to leach mode (which will all but kill your transfer speed)
then by just using bittorrent to download a movie you are helping to distribute it.
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That's why downloading movies from TPB is perfectly legal but redistribution without permission is not.
Are you high right now?
I hope you don't actually believe that..or that you are not a US/EU citizen.
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Chapter I of the French Intellectual Property Code [legifrance.gouv.fr], apparently [casalonga.com]. From a Google translation, it seems to state explicitly that the mere act of creation invokes copyright protection.
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But does it apply to government employees?
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But does it apply to government employees?
This is a relevant question regarding the damage done. Are government documents copyrightable in France? In Sweden where I live these kinds of documents are explicitly exempt from copyright and put into the public domain. Swedes can also request a copy of any government document not explicitly covered by confidentiality laws.
But it is not entirely relevant if they argue that the crime is hacking into a computer system, which is usually covered by different laws altogether. So getting the documents in this w
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Actually, no. The agency acted responsibly, it did NOT appeal the decision and further embarrass itself. Instead, it was the Parquet de Justice (think of it as an equivalent of US General Attorney) who seized the affair and appealed in their place, and in the end got Laurelli sentenced for whatever reason they could muster at the time.
This is very much a case of blunt, direct censorship attempt through usurpation of judicial authority by some executive administration.
Put
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In particular, if the door is unlocked, that doesn't mean you can walk into the building and take photocopies of everything you find there, then publish the documents.
This isn't an unlocked, unsupervised door to a building, this is your crazy ex who still has a valid key holding a garage sale while you are out of town. The people perusing the contents of your home looking for items to take/buy didn't know the crazy ex did not have the right to let them in.
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but there is no warning, no separation between the files they wanted people to read and the files they didn't want people to read.
I can't just post nekkid photos of myself on a publicly accessible and indexed web page and then start suing people when they mock me for them...
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I can't just post nekkid photos of myself on a publicly accessible and indexed web page and then start suing people when they mock me for them...
Except that you can totally do that. You shouldn't be able to, and probably won't win..but it's attempted on a semi-regular basis I think. Also the word nekkid is hilarious.
what a TERRIBLE analogy (Score:2)
In particular, if the door is unlocked, that doesn't mean you can walk into the building and take photocopies of everything you find there, then publish the documents.
This is a prime example of the misuse of analogies to try and equate things which are not the same.
How is clicking on an online link in any way similar to walking into a building? A building has walls purpose built to keep people out. In the case of this French website, what is your "wall"? And to stretch your faulty analogy further, if an area appears to be public land, are you not able to stroll around and take photographs?
Saving face by hurting innocent people (Score:5, Interesting)
I HATE it when governments do this. They can't simply admit to having made a mistake and made those files public (albeit difficult to find). They have to fine this poor person just for coming across something interesting and posting it.
Fuck them. Fuck them hard with a chainsaw, every last one of them who pushed for this.
really (Score:2)
I guess my tech illiterate grandma is a hacker then because she can use Google too.
If clicking a link on google is all it takes for you to be branded a hacker now why don't they just lock up everyone that is not Amish (who in turn act as our jailers as they are the only one that can't google things).
Laws server their purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
Government sets rules on what you can and cannot do,
Government interprets those rules,
Government imposes punishments based on those interpretations.
You piss off the government, they use the laws to make your life hell.
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If the law is "working" as it should, you know what you can and cannot do *before* you do it, and you are dissuaded from doing what you *know* you aren't supposed to do. This situation is nothing like that.
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Right, because France is full of Republican legislators.
Streisand effect? (Score:2)
French government (Score:4, Funny)
Often I marvel at how banal the American government is. Then, occasionally, the UK or French governments make me feel a little better.
Re:French government (Score:4, Interesting)
How can you appeal an acquital?
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Acquittals are regularly appealed. It could be due to many causes including invalid ruling by the judge, incorrect jury instructions, jury tampering, etc. Basically the premise is that the original trial was flawed in some substantial way and they need to do it again.
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Re:French government (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, no, they cannot. In the US that is known as "double jeopardy" and is not allowed. If you're acquitted, you're done. They can find new evidence, you can write a full confession, it doesn't matter. When that gavel comes down on the "not guilty" verdict, you're no longer capable of being held criminally liable for that particular crime.
If a case is dismissed without prejudice, it can be retried. There is no verdict in that scenario. There's also a separate sovereigns exception, which in some circumstances could allow the feds their own shot at prosecuting, though that wouldn't be applicable here since this would have been tried as a federal crime to begin with.
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You can also go talk to Federal prosecutors for a trumped up 'civil rights violation' charge.
No more 7331 envy here (Score:2)
I've always referred to myself as a lowly grinder, far beneath the vaulted hacker. I'm feeling pretty high on the geek scale now.
Woot! (Score:2)
tr. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." aka "Lèse-majesté"
Fortunately (Score:5, Funny)
Not the end of the story (Score:2)
In this case, the "hacked" agency was not willing to sue, because they were ashamed of having published documents by mistake.
The case happened anyway because the general attorney wanted it, despite he did not understand what it was about.
The case will now probably move to the Cour de Cassation or the Conseil d'Etat, which are both french supreme courts.
Not the full story (a.k.a RTF) (Score:3, Insightful)
Struggling with this (Score:2)
I'm finding it difficult to tie this to US policy somehow. Does anyone know how the US caused this? Was there some sort of US IP in the documents that were exposed?
I'd appreciate any help. Thanks.
What if he linked to them? (Score:2)
But Google was not fined? (Score:2)
> Guy clicks links on Google search engine, is fined
Am I the only one who has a problem with this "logic"?
Re:Why is anything accessable on the internet rega (Score:5, Insightful)
If you left a book on the street out the front of your house, but didn't give anybody your address, is it somebodies fault if they read the book?
There is no expectation of privacy here, it is a publicly accessible web page.
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No, it is not someone's fault if they read it. But your analogy isn't quite accurate. This is not a case of someone stumbling over a link, and innocently reading a bit. He knew it wasn't supposed to be accessible, he knew it was a mistake, but he copied it and then re-published bits in his blog.
Yes, those that left it there unsecured screwed up and should answer for that. And maybe it should have been public knowledge, I don't know. But let's not pretend it was all done in innocence.
So this is more lik
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Both wrong.
If the book contains obviously non-public information, then, as soon as you realise this, you're not allowed to read any further, and you're not allowed to re-publish any of it, and you should notify the home owner of the problem. This guy didn't do any of those things, even though he knew the files to be non-public, that's why they prosecuted him.
If he's downloaded a bunch of files, read them, and then told the agency that these files were publicly accessible and that he'd deleted the copies he
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Lots of countries had to drop cases due to that lack of any laws covering basic system entry and file transfer out of their system with logs been of little help.
So legal teams in many countries now face stiff new fines and very clear legal definitions regarding computer network access. The govs now have the experts, funding and political support to win.
Layer on le
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But if someone hangs "Public Entrance" over their door, then imprisons you and fines you after you show people what you saw inside, they might be the French government.
Re:Reasonable (Score:4, Informative)
From the article
UPDATE: Laurelli ended up admitting in testimony that when he found the documents, he traveled back to the homepage that they stemmed from and found an authentication page. This indicated that the documents were likely supposed to be protected. That admission played a part in his later conviction in the appeals court.
The hung out an "authorized persons only" sign but forgot to lock the door.
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It's still a public-facing website, and his entry point was public. If you build a mall, provide multiple public-facing entrances, but only put a security guard on one of those entrances, it should NOT be a crime for someone to walk into your mall via one of the other entrances.
Also, he was convicted of "theft of documents and fraudulent retention of information." Theft? Fraud? WTF? Unless there's actual evidence of criminal intent, I agree with an earlier poster, they punished him because they were embarr
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Due to the fact that he new about the authorization page he knew he he didn't ha authorization have the documents but copied them anyway that is theft.
Re:Reasonable (Score:4, Informative)
Hmm. It's not clear to me from reading the article whether he knew before downloading them that he was not authorised. That said, I will grant that as soon as he did find out, he had a problem and should have acted accordingly.
Concerning the court's competence, I found this part disturbing:
1. The first court ruled the Laurelli wasn't guilty. ANSES, the source of the documents, subsequently declined to pursue any civil action. Despite this, the DCRI appealed and pursued _anyway_, yet the prosecution didn't have a proper understanding of what they were prosecuting!
2. It was actually established by ANSES that those files (however inadvertently) were _accessible_, not inaccessible, to the public, so the court has rendered judgement directly contrary to the evidence presented by the same national agency from which the data was downloaded.
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More like he came in through an unlocked side door with no sign, thought "Uh is this for the public?" and left through the main door only to find that it needs a key to open from the outside and there's a sign saying "Authorized persons only". So far, a honest mistake on his part and not anything he could be blamed for. But when you go back in through the side door and start cleaning the place out, that's not a mistake anymore.
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More like they hung a sign, locked the door, and forgot to build the walls.
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Not only that, but he didn't merely download the files, but republished some of the material on his own website. Even in the U.S. that can lead to big fines or lawsuits for copyright infringement.
Except that, in the US, most if not all works created by the Federal Government or its agents are automatically placed in the public domain [wikipedia.org].
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First, it's not theft. Making a copy will never be theft. Get over it.
Second, yes, it damn well should be legal. The Internet is primarily a publishing engine. It's for publishing things. As in, making them available to the public. If you're an ignorant jackoff, you shouldn't be on the fucking Internet in the first place. Your malware infested piece of shit computer is a menace to everyone around you. No, there should be no penalty for anyone accessing files YOU PUBLISHED. Or files the government p
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First, it's not theft. Making a copy will never be theft. Get over it.
Then there is no theft of credit card information or any other personal information stored on servers. Sorry but I don't believe that.
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It's stronger than to original statement.
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The post I was commenting on get into trouble when making absolute statement like "Making a copy will never be theft". I was merely pointing out how that blanket statement was incorrect.
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It wasn't an accident that he downloaded them, it was an accident that they were up there at all, or in a publicly-accessible way. They were indexed by Google, after all (shouldn't they have been named co-defendants?)
From the gibberish in TFA, it sounds like the site had some sort of Javascript user authentication on index and search pages, but direct URLs always worked. I'm not sure how that let Google index them, but even the government is claiming that anyone who tried to access those URLs would get 200s
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I'm not sure how that let Google index them
I discovered that Google was indexing pages on it site that were only ever linked from emails - my guess is that they index any links in mails to and from gmail accounts. We just used robots.txt - the pages are for public consumption, it's just simple if they're not easily searchable.
In short, if you mention it via gmail it'll probably be indexed.
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If you misconfigure your wireless access point and leave it open, does that mean that it should be legal for anybody to connect to your network and download all the files from your NAS without penalty? Including *those* pictures of you and ____ doing _____ to _____, and your tax returns from the past 5 years?
Yes. You wouldn't blame the recipients if, instead of a misconfigured wireless access point, it was your crazy ex who still had a key who was giving out free copies of those documents, would you?
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Yes it should be legal. You are the one broadcasting your information out to the public, why would it be illegal for someone to listen?
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The first one is obviously intended for local use, and unless one has good reasons to believe otherwise one should assume it's private content.
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In the US you can lose/win a criminal trial and then win/lose a civil suit. In this case he won the criminal trial and lost a civil suit (how the gov can file a civil suit I have no idea I don't know France) which can happen in the US as well. OJ owed (owes?) a bunch of money in restitution after his little incident, because he lost the civil suit.