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United States Your Rights Online

Russian Student Arrested For Revealing DirecTV Secrets 467

Posted by timothy from the all-over-again dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press is reporting the arrest of Igor Serebryany, 19, of Los Angeles for industrial espionage under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996. Serebryany is accused of providing details of DirecTVs 'P4' card technology to a number of websites."
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Russian Student Arrested For Revealing DirecTV Secrets More

Russian Student Arrested For Revealing DirecTV Secrets

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  • Information wants to be free!

  • Real reason for arrest (Score:5, Funny)

    by dr_dank ( 472072 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:32PM (#5001511) Homepage Journal
    According to confidential law enforcement memos, he is also suspected of starting the "IN SOVIET RUSSIA" cliche.

    This has a maximum punishment of 20 years of hard labor building beowulf clusters for Profit!

  • Sounds about right. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rimbo ( 139781 ) <rimbosity@sbcgDE ... net minus distro> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:33PM (#5001521) Homepage Journal
    What he did is just as illegal as if I'd stolen a bunch of information on Magellan's tracking software to distribute or use for my company's navigation software. This doesn't appear to be a case where the technology was reverse engineered and published by that means, which should be protected.

    You'll note that this is not being described as a DMCA case, but as industrial espionage. And if it's true and he's convicted, he should go to jail like all the other white-collar criminals who do this.

    • Re:Sounds about right. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:47PM (#5001684) Homepage Journal
      It also sounds as if he may have violated the attorney-client privilege between the law firm that employed him and their customer DirectTV. The information he is said to have taken is information that you could not have gotten under subpoena in the US, because customer-attorney discussions are treated as secret in the law. Besides being against whatever NDA the law firm made him sign, this is probably something that would offend most judges.

      Bruce

      • Re:Sounds about right. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:54PM (#5001756) Homepage Journal
        And by the way, since we're speaking about industrial espionage, is ESR's involvement with the Haloween memos - which presumably he received from a Microsoft employee and published - industrial espionage? I think technically it might be, although MS has more to lose from charging him than it does from leaving him alone. Unless, of course, they are delibrate leaks.

        Bruce

        • Interesting question considering the large number of leaked internal memos etc that are showing up on the net these days.

          The only thing I can think is that the document contained no trade secrets which I believed to be what constituted industrial espionage. Of course i'm not a lawyer so I should probably shut up now.
        • That's a good question. I haven't actually read the Halloween memos, only browsed them a while ago, but here's my take.

          In this case, the guy used his priviledged position (working in DirecTV's law firm) to gain information, while ESR got his through a leak.

          The DirecTV documents contain design information that can be used to break the system and to create an equivalent system without researching it. Halloween is, I believe, a set of strategy documents which can be used to aid the competition.

          The biggest difference, however, is given in the article. Before March 2002, it was very difficult to use the Corporate Espionage law. It required the cooperation of highly-placed Justice department officials. I don't know what happened to change it, but before that date, Microsoft may not have had whatever was required to activate the clause; now, it may be too late to activate it.

        • I don't think that quite fits; that would be more akin to DirecTV bringing charges against the websites that were supplied information by this guy, than charging him with releasing the info. This kid and MS employees sign an NDA, not the websites or ESR. *IANAL

      • Re:Sounds about right. (Score:2, Interesting)

        by X ( 1235 )
        Since we wasn't a lawyer, but rather was in the employ of a lawyer, is it possible for him to violate attorney-client privilege (I honestly don't know)?

        • Re:Sounds about right. (Score:5, Informative)

          by satch89450 ( 186046 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @07:29PM (#5002522) Homepage

          Since [h]e wasn't a lawyer, but rather was in the employ of a lawyer, is it possible for him to violate attorney-client privilege (I honestly don't know)?

          The correct answer is "it depends on which state we are talking about." Basic agency/principal law would say that the action of the lawyer's employee would reflect on the lawyer himself/herself, and the disclosure is a clear violation of the canons of virtually every state of the Union. The devil is in the details of the Codes of Conduct of the State Bar Association.

          One thing is virtually certain: that lawyer is going to have a very bad start to 2003.

          IANAL -- I am not a lawyer

  • Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gpinzone ( 531794 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:35PM (#5001534) Homepage Journal
    Mitnick finally gets out of jail, Skylov gets amnesty, and now I gotta endure all the "FREE SEREBRYANY" sigs on Slashdot. When will the madness stop?!
    • I thought Mitnick was out of jail for a long time...wasn't he out but prohibited from using any form of the Internet? And isn't his term of being prohibited from it coming up in the next thirty or so days?

  • Man arrested for obvious criminal activity... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ErnstKompressor ( 193799 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:35PM (#5001536) Homepage
    Any takers?

  • Yes, but did he *sell* them? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by KaMiKa-Z77 ( 610817 ) <carlos.rubalcava ... m ['mai' in gap]> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:37PM (#5001556) Homepage
    The article states:
    "Serebryany was charged under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 [...] It prohibits anyone from disclosing trade secrets for economic benefit"

    But it does not say wether he sold the info to the websites. If he did, I'd say he's in deep doodoo.

    • Re:Yes, but did he *sell* them? (Score:4, Informative)

      by geek ( 5680 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:39PM (#5001585)
      Does it need to be HIS economic benefit? If not then the sites he gave it to benefitted. Why aren't they introuble for recieving stolen merchandise?

      I don't think we have all the facts here. Unless I'm missing something.
      • The article doesn't show if the sites benifited from the documents or even can benefit from the documents.
        • It wouldn't take much to prove economic benift from this. Their traffic and associated revenue (advertising or otherwise) are increased by having these documents posted. Sort of like if you'd posted insider information to ArsTechnica aboutthe ps3 or something.

          I also remeber something about, legally speaking, possible economic benifit being as bad as actual benifit. If you stole trade secrets, and lose your shirt on the deal by selling them for less then it cose you to get them, you still can go to jail.

    • Re:Yes, but did he *sell* them? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nynaeve ( 163450 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:41PM (#5001605)
      Read the last paragraph:

      It prohibits anyone from disclosing trade secrets for economic benefit, and carries penalties in this case up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Although investigators acknowledge that Serebryany apparently didn't profit from the disclosures, the law bars giving away secrets for anyone else's economic benefit.

    • There appears to be a fundamental problem with this law and it appears that we have all had our panties in such a bunch about the DMCA that we neglected to notice this over the last 6 years. I don't think that stealing trade secrets is good, and I don't think that people that do this should get a pass.


      But look at what this new law says: if you misappropriate a trade secret and *anybody* profits from it, then you are committing "economic espionage". Pretty much any leaked trade secret can be argued to profit somebody. Remember the article from a few weeks back about the price information leaked on some website? Well, maybe competitors profited. Shit, must be economic espionage. Even though it's just arbitrary chunks of business data, not detailed technical information, schematics, source code, or other copyrightable material, it's still a "trade secret" to somebody. There is a reason that trade secrets always used to receive weak protection under the law - any arbitrary piece of information can be a trade secret, and information DOES leak like an anus on Olestra. A law enforcing the secret status of trade secrets can be whipped out against almost anybody who pisses off their employer or former employer, and does seem to be open to substantial amounts of potential abuse and capricious prosecution.


      Luckily, this case seems pretty cut and dried. This guy sounds like he really directly misappropriated quite valuable trade secrets, and he probably deserves to go to jail if he's actually guilty. But the law (which is well and amply described here [bipc.com])
      But look at the way DMCA prosecution has been handled. I'm just surprised that we haven't heard about more abusive cases involving this law, and I fear we will hear more in the future.

  • Corporate Espionage Act (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rootmonkey ( 457887 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:37PM (#5001562)
    "It prohibits anyone from disclosing trade secrets for economic benefit, and carries penalties in this case up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Although investigators acknowledge that Serebryany apparently didn't profit from the disclosures, the law bars giving away secrets for anyone else's economic benefit. "

    Will the charges hold up under this act?
    • "Will the charges hold up under this act?"

      It's an issue for the lawyers and courts to decide, which frequently has little bearing on common sense. Should they prove that he did acquire the documents without permission (as opposed to, oh say, reverse-engineering the information) then I imagine that all they'd have to prove is that the information -could- be used by another party for economic benefit, not that his intention was for that to happen. And that will be very easy to prove, since there are companies that make cable converters and the like, and even an individual stealing DirecTV gains economically by virtue of not having to pay for what he/she receives.

  • Why 'Your Rights Online' Category (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ScaryClown ( 62064 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:38PM (#5001573)
    Why is it that everyone at slashdot feels like they have the rights to any information that is out there?

    This person stole technology plans while working at a law firm. He didn't reverse engineer, he stole. This is illegal and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. This is not a case of our rights being stepped on. This is a case of the rights of a company to trust that when they disclose something to a law firm that it won't end up all over the internet.
    • While I absolutly agree that this is of dubious news value in the YRO category, there is one point. The choice of laws that they are going to prosecute him under.

      from the article:

      Serebryany was charged under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, a law so powerful that until March 2002 only the most senior Justice Department officials in Washington could authorize prosecutors to wield it. Only about 35 criminal cases have been filed under the law.

      It prohibits anyone from disclosing trade secrets for economic benefit, and carries penalties in this case up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Although investigators acknowledge that Serebryany apparently didn't profit from the disclosures, the law bars giving away secrets for anyone else's economic benefit.

    • Re:Why 'Your Rights Online' Category (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DarkSkiesAhead ( 562955 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:59PM (#5001815)

      Why is it that everyone at slashdot feels like they have the rights to any information that is out there?
      I think you misunderstand the slashdot crowd. It's not that everyone here thinks they have the right to everything. The slashdot crowd is concerned about vague, overly-strict laws being used inappropriately. This incident is a possible (not certain, bet definately possible) example of such an issue.

      Serebryany was accused of violating a law which prohibits stealing economic secrets for profit, or for the profit of those to whom the secrets are provided. Serebryany, however, did not profit from them, does not appear to expect to profit, and the websites do not appear to be profiting. This would seem to be the misapplication of a very strong law for the purpose of busting someone who has greatly pissed off a very large corporation but may only be guilty of a minor crime.

      The greater issue is that if the government can get away with applying laws recklessly and arbitrarily then people whose jobs/lives/hobbies involve information or activities which might one day be injustly prosecuted may be in danger. This is rather worrisome to the slashdot crowd for obvious reasons.

  • Serebryany obtained the documents while working part-time at a law firm in California that performed legal work for DirecTV.
    Another classic example of how security through obscurity doesn't work. It's only as strong as your weakest link!
    How much must a company lose before it realizes it should work smarter not harder?
    • How is this security through obscurity? This is a simple failure of procedural security. The law firm that this happened at should have to explain to DirecTV how a part-timer got this much access to this much sensitive information. If he was supposed to have that access, and they didn't hit him with tons of NDAs, then it's also their fault. If he was supposed to have access and he *did* get hit with tons of NDAs, then they (rightly) should prosecute the hell out of him.

      But inno way does this have anything to do with security through obscurity...why would you think it does?
    • No. This is another classic example of a trusted employee violating the trust of his/her employer.

      Go grind your axe somewhere else.

  • The weakest link in security (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bobdotorg ( 598873 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:39PM (#5001583)
    Yet anoher example of the weakest link in security being the human link.

    I've followed DirecTv's skirmishes with hackers for a few years and have always believed that Dave's (DirecTV / NDS) house of cards would crumble from the inside. It's simply a matter of how many people have access to the keys.

  • Yea, and? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sdo1 ( 213835 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:41PM (#5001600) Journal
    Before anyone goes crazy (yea, when has -that- ever happened here), please go read the article. Here's a useful quote...

    Serebryany obtained the documents while working part-time at a law firm in California that performed legal work for DirecTV.

    I'm -sure- they had to have had a non-disclosure agreement in place, especially working with a law firm. They guy broke the law and stole coroprate trade secrets. He should be arrested.

    Now if he'd bought himself a DirecTV receiver and reverse-engineered the thing himself, and then got arrested, I'd scream "foul!". But come on... this is no Dmitry Skylarov case. This sounds like a case working the way the law should work.

    -S

    • Is breaking an NDA a criminal act? Breach of contract is normally something handled in civil court. You might be made to pay damages, but you won't be going to jail for it. Or perhaps I don't understand how things work in the post-DMCA America.
    • Except of course that the law requires him, or the people he directly traded the secrets with to have economic gains from the secrets. He has not, and as far as anyone knows none of the direct contacts have (as the docs haven't lead to cracking the cards).

      If it's an NDA issue, then deal with it via breach of contract.

      I think that the guy should be arrested, as what he did was wrong, but I worry that this law is not the one he broke.

  • This is good (Score:2, Redundant)

    by aridhol ( 112307 )
    OK, this guy "acquires" design documents for DirecTV's system. How did he get them? He probably acquired them illegally. Then, holding documents that were probably labelled as "Internal Use - Do Not Distribute", he distributes them to warez sites. Then we make a big deal 'cause he gets busted.

    Listen people. You do the crime, you do the time. Would we be whining if he was arrested for stealing DirecTV's CEO's car? How about their money? Why are these documents any different?

    • Re:This is good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by unicron ( 20286 ) <unicron AT thcnet DOT net> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:50PM (#5001716) Homepage
      I'm not trying to troll here, but this shit is tiring after awhile. The fact that this is listed under YRO is some laughable shit. Committing a crime is committing a crime. I don't care how intelligent you had to be to do it or if you used your linux box or you put an advanced knowledge of computing into it, it's still a crime. I'm so sick of all of these people on /. thinking that if someone breaks the law, but they do it in a really bitching way using technology, or the crime itself revolves around technology, then that person should be elevated to the status of a hero.

      If 5 years from now, cars became so computer controlled that you could literally hack into them and steal them, then drive them remotely, and some guy did this, it shames me to say that it would make a YRO article and we would be called to arms to defend this obvious victim from the slings and arrows of the cruel and unjust American justice system.
    • Sorry to reply to myself...I read the article and missed the line where he acquired it through the law firm he worked for.

      So he probably had a non-disclosure agreement that he broke. Breach of contract. Trafficking stolen goods. Even without the Corporate Espionage charge, he'd be in a bit of shit.

    • Because The Man is keeping us down with his trade secrets! Because IP has no intrinsic value because it is not a physical object! Because it's not stealing if you copy something you do not have a legal right to copy! Because we all want your stuff for free! (Touch our stuff and we'll send in the GNU-Goons to break your kneecaps!)

  • Fry him (Score:4, Redundant)

    by Uhh_Duh ( 125375 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:42PM (#5001619) Homepage

    Since he obtained the documents working for a law firm, and I have a hard time believing a law firm wouldn't make an employee sign an NDA, this guy should fry.

    No sympathy for those that distribute trade secrets. Intellectual property is far too valuable to ignore cases like this.

    My 2.5 cents.

    • Re:Fry him (Score:5, Informative)

      by Uhh_Duh ( 125375 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:59PM (#5001816) Homepage

      For those of you with no knowledge of american culture.. "Fry him" often just means "send him up the creek". Calm down kids.

      • Re:Fry him (Score:5, Informative)

        by MegaFur ( 79453 ) <[moc.nzz.ymok] [ta] [0dryw]> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @07:08PM (#5002391) Journal
        It's good of you to be helpful by explaining that "fry him", in this case, does not mean "kill him". However, note that you have replaced one weird American idiom with another ("send him up the creek").

        To anyone still confused: in this case, it's likely that the original poster simply meant that the justice system should show the alleged stealer of secrets no mercy--that they should prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law. It's doubtful that the original poster meant that they should electrocute the alleged thief.

  • Wish I could afford to buy laws like that.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zatz ( 37585 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:42PM (#5001625) Homepage
    I could understand treating international industrial espionage as a criminal matter; I don't think you can get someone extradited to face a suit in civil court, which is where this is normally resolved. But the guy lives in the US. Why isn't a suit good enough? Has disclosing a trade secret been considered criminal until recently?

    Reading a (slightly dated) article [bc.edu] on the legislation being used to prosecute him, I'm not even convinced that requirements of intent are met in this case. Who was he hoping to provide economic benefit to? Do the satellite hackers sell mod chips?
    • It depends on who he gave it to. Some Canadian vendors sold kits for the old H cards. If I remember correctly these went for about $150US each. There had to be some profit in that. I've also heard that those same systems could be used with the HU cards. Hence DirecTV distributes the P4 cards.
    • There's a totally obvious economic benefit here. He gave the documentation away, in the hope that others would be able to get satellite TV for free. Getting something for free, that would normally be paid for, possibly expensively, is a definite economic benefit. Doesn't get any more cut and dried than that.
      • That's not obvious. It's not anything you can hoard or resell, for example. Just because the satellite service charges a lot for it doesn't make it worth that much.

        I think even the argument that the satellite companies are harmed by lost revenue is stronger.
        • How can you say there's no economic benefit, to getting something for free, that you would otherwise be obligated to pay a sum of money for?!?!

  • This is illegal anywhere (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drunkmonk ( 241978 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:43PM (#5001643) Homepage
    As a few other posters have already said, it looks like this kid just straight-up stole information DirecTV. That's illegal in any country, and I'm going to say he'll probably be treated nicer than he would be had he gotten caught in a number of other countries.

    What's funny is that Slashdot is reporting this as a YRO article... I'm pretty sure industrial espionage isn't on anyone's list of rights...
    • I'm pretty sure industrial espionage isn't on anyone's list of rights...

      Hehheh ... read some of the other posts.

      There are a number of people who are hostile to intellectual property in any form, until it bited them. "Information just wants to be free" is like "you can't legislate morality" -- sounds nice, but carried to the extreme it's absurd. The legislation jingle could be intelligently limited to private, consensual acts; and the first? Well, that's a hot issue, but it should be easy here. Where the secret-holder doesn't want to share -- do you then have a right to break in? Maybe if you steal without disturbing anything?

      I'm amused that a 19 y.o. is suddenly a "kid." Because he can't drink?

    • Re:This is illegal anywhere (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anixamander ( 448308 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @06:01PM (#5001840) Journal
      What's funny is that Slashdot is reporting this as a YRO article... I'm pretty sure industrial espionage isn't on anyone's list of rights...

      You're new here, aren't you?

      Information wants to be stolen.
      I will now prepare for my first flamebait mod.

  • Profit? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gpinzone ( 531794 )
    1. Post DirecTV secrets on Internet
    2. ???
    3. Profit!!!

    The government needs to find the answer to #2 if they want to prosecute him under that law. Now, they could wait until modified chips start be sold assuming the information he took actually helps such a device to be created. Even if it could, how could they have enough proof to say that the circumvention device actually benefited from his leaked information? Innocent until proven guilty. At least, that's the way it's supposed to work.

    • not entirely correct... (Score:3, Informative)

      by kajoob ( 62237 )
      Here is 18 U.S.C. sec. 1831 for your own eyes, but it looks like he only had to "know" that it would benefit a foreign gov't, agent, or instrumtality. To me I think the intent of this statute is to prevent espionage of the overseas variety, but good lawyers make their money fleshing out the grey areas like this when it's the person that is foreign. Who knows if he wanted to benefit foreign gov'ts; to my mind I think he just wanted free DirecTV. DirecTV has just been plagued by these hacked cards so long, I think the reason they're bringing charges under sec.1831 is they've done some serious lobbying to help bring out the big guns to make an example of some people now.

      here's the statutory goodness...

      1831. Economic espionage

      (a) In General.-- Whoever, intending or knowing that the offense will benefit any foreign government, foreign instrumentality, or foreign agent, knowingly--

      (1) steals, or without authorization appropriates, takes, carries away, or conceals, or by fraud, artifice, or deception obtains a trade secret:
      (2) without authorization copies, duplicates, sketches, draws, photographs, downloads, uploads, alters, destroys, photocopies, replicates, transmits, delivers, sends, mails, communicates, or conveys a trade secret:

      (3) receives, buys, or possesses a trade secret, knowing the same to have been stolen or appropriated, obtained, or converted without authorization:

      (4) attempts to commit any offense described in any of paragraphs (1) through (3); or

      (5) conspires with one or more other persons to commit any offense described in any of paragraphs (1) through (4), and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of conspiracy.
      shall, except as provided in subsection (b), be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both.

      (b) ORGANIZATIONS.- Any organization that commits any offense described in subsection (a) shall be fined not more than $10,000,000.

  • Take a deep breath and read the story.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by killbill ( 10058 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:44PM (#5001650) Homepage
    Take a deep breath and read the story before going off here (unlike the editors who post these stories)...

    The guy *worked* for a legal company that had access to sensitive company documents. He *stole* the documents, then released them to the underground web sites.

    This was not some clever hacker sitting in a basement and figuring a bunch of stuff out with a soldering iron in one hand and scope probes in the other.

    How would you feel if some clerk at your university office did the same thing with your class transcripts? Some waiter posted your charge card number? Some guy at the help desk of your ISP sold your email account and password to a company that writes spammer distribution programs?

    There are legitimate issues with the DCMA and similar legislation and common law that *really need* to be hammered out. Waving guys like this around as "little guy getting stuck by the man" is the *worst* thing we can do for sensible legislation.
    • The guy *worked* for a legal company that had access to sensitive company documents. He *stole* the documents, then released them to the underground web sites.

      This was not some clever hacker sitting in a basement and figuring a bunch of stuff out with a soldering iron in one hand and scope probes in the other.

      What is illegal is that he obtained this information that is a trade secret of DirectTV. The fact that he obtained the information from a legal firm is not at issue - or he would be sued in civil court in breach of his NDA, not find himself in criminal court on industrial espionage charges.

      Why does the mechanism by which he obtained those secrets important? Do you really believe that because it is done by a hacker this somehow magically makes it okay? What exactly makes obtaining trade secrets through reverse engineering alright, but doing so by reading documents in a lawyer's office illegal? It is the fact that he obtained and published the secrets that is wrong, not the manner by which he aqcuired them.
      • If I purchase a DirecTV box, and then take it out in my garage and play with it/hack it to figure out how it works, that should be my choice to make, I own the box after all. If I use the information I obtain to then steal from DirecTV by obtaining programming I didn't pay for, sure I'm a theif... However, there is no way for them to know I have obtained this information therefore the law is really uninforcable (unless I post all of the info to the web)
      • What exactly makes obtaining trade secrets through reverse engineering alright, but doing so by reading documents in a lawyer's office illegal?

        The same thing that makes trade secrets a valid method of Intellectual Property protection only until the secret is disclosed. Once word about a trade secret is out you have no legal recourse. Presumably if the information were worthy of legal protection, the company that 'owned' it would get a patent on it. Since they did not, the information is only proprietary to them until somebody else figures it out. If somebody else discovers the secret through reverse engineering, the company the trade secret no longer has any legal protection. Even in this case, DirecTV can prosecute this guy, but afterward they are still without their trade secret. The prosecution will be for how he obtained and distributed it, not that he obtained and distributed it. It's not the knowledge or the distribution of the knowledge that makes this illegal, but solely the method through which the knowledge was obtained that makes it illegal.

        What is illegal is that he obtained this information that is a trade secret of DirectTV.

        This is where you were misguided. The only thing that protects a trade secret is that it's a secret. Once the secret is out there's no more protection. If the secret gets out because DirecTV implemented said secret and sold the product on the market than all that's protecting the secret is the obcurity of their implementation. It's perfectly legal to try and figure out how something you own works, and once you know how it works the trade secret isn't a secret anymore.
  • now here's a real group focused on piracy. i lived briefly with one, a real nasty person too. they make about anywhere from 100-300 bucks a pop and purely at the expense of the sat companies.

    good to see this defined as what it is, not DMCA.

    fact is, they are very clearly breaking the law, very deliberately, and they make a considerable sum doing so. the one i knew, earned about 50k in a year. i am glad the asshole is not part of my life anymore. a real pathetic schmuck too, so worried about IRS that he spent it all on toys (stereo, new machines) and strippers, then sat around and said he couldn't afford rent, or couldn't find a job because he was just unemployed and not reporting his Stolen income. he was 27 at the time.

    sad to see a 19 yo kid getting stomped on. 19 yo kids just see the law as something to break anyway.

  • I give up. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xenoweeno ( 246136 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:48PM (#5001690)
    What does a teenager committing brazen theft have to do with My Rights Online?
    • That you know the US is doing this and that this case can be an example of what can happen to your kids or your company, should you have any.

  • (some) Republicans hate Russians... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by _Sambo ( 153114 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @05:51PM (#5001728)
    That is if you are a Russian living in or visiting the US. There is an instant distrust extended to foreigners living in a strange land. But the US has no monopoly on bigotry. I've been on the receiving end of that deal in Russia.

    I'm a Republican who loves Russia. I lived in Russia for two years after high school and graduated with a degree in Russian.

    As far as this case goes, it's going to be a difficult one for both the prosecutors and the defenders. In order for the prosecution to win, they'll have to prove that Igor Serebryany was trying to steal secrets for his, or someone else's profit.

    It seems that the Corporations would have had a better case by going after the law firm that breached a contractual relationship of trust. Bringing the feds in was not the best move. Igor will not finish his education here, even if he wins the case, and that is the really sucky part of this whole deal.

    • He committed a very blatant crime. He's getting everything he deserves, I'd say. If anything the only reason that I would say this sucks, is if the taxpayers have to support him while he's incarcerated. Hopefully they'll just put him on a slow boat back home.

  • Fry him ... sure, it only takes 3 minutes to reboot, but my tivo is a linux box - sacrificing uptime makes baby jesus cry.
  • Is -how- he got caught I love a good forensics story. I'll bet all my karma that he u/l'ed those docs right from the law firm. :)

    Seriously though, this may hurt anyone under the age of 25 trying to get a job outside the .gov that deals with sensitive info. Its unfortunate at least b/c no one that young will ever be given a chance to prove their worth at that law firm again.

  • nationality (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kin_korn_karn ( 466864 )
    Why am I inclined to think that if he was an American teenager, he wouldn't have been arrested? It would have just been, "now junior, just give us back those codes and we won't tell anyone about your little hacking escapade, and we won't put you in jail, either".
    • I don't know what his citizenship status is, but if he's not an American citizen he should be immediately deported after he serves his jail sentence.

  • DirecTV and me (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dl248 ( 67452 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @06:10PM (#5001917) Homepage
    As a Canadian who has a DirectTV dish and receiver and loves watching "grey market" TV, I hope there are more guys like him at DirectTV. Sure dealers of the hardware and those in the US are getting arrested in droves, but the Canadian end-user is apparently never bothered by the law.

    What I do isn't in the moral good-books, but I can't imagine paying for the piles of crappy programming that are offered by DirectTV or the Canadian equivilants -- I watch the NHL games the the occasional movie, and would pay a reasonable fee to do it above-board, but I can't seriously imagine shelling out hundreds per month to do it.

    FYI -- Canadians CAN'T subscribe to DirectTV due to Canadian laws, as the government feels that we should be using the alternatives in our own country. However that doesn't stop a wackload of people from watching "grey-market" TV -- it isn't illegal, but you can't actually legally subscribe to it. It's really a very strange situation.
  • Please. My rights do not included theft of trade secrets. There is no kid genius reverse engineering their encrytpion scheme. He stole the documentation via his employer, and gave this information away/or sold it, not clear on that part.

    Guy deserves to go to jail, plain and simple. No rights have been violated other than DirecTV's and the law firms.

  • Big Discrepancy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LinuxHam ( 52232 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @06:15PM (#5001967) Homepage Journal
    Well, maybe not *that* big, but ABC News is reporting [go.com] that he actually worked for a digital IMAGING company that was contracted out by the law firm to create digital copies of these sensitive docs. Adjust arguments appropriately knowing that he didn't work for the law firm.

    Sometimes it helps to search [google.com] for alternative versions of the story.
  • I read the summary, then read the article. My first two reactions (roughly simultaneous) were:
    • This guys stole, and deserves to be punished, and
    • The slashdot crowd is going to try to make this guy into a martyr/hero
    Then I look at the comments here at slashdot, and all of the top moderated comments says, more or less, "this guy stole, and deserves to be punished." Most also anticipate the same overreaction. And I'm sure it is out there, in some of the lower moderated comments, but on the whole, it looks like we're having the same sane reaction, even as each of us assumes he or she is the only sane one around here. Interesting, I thought.

  • My beef is... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Helpadingoatemybaby ( 629248 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @06:30PM (#5002086)
    How this guy managed to get a hold of vital P4 Direct Tv information, and yet managed to do it in such a clumsy way as to get caught.

    Yes, it was industrial espionage, yes he deserves to go to jail, etc. etc., but all he had to do was to sit on the information for a few months until his job expired and then release it through an anonymous remailer in Norway.

    As a guy sitting in Canada, who is not allowed to subscribe to Direct TV, we have to pirate it to watch the Sopranos on HBO. And it annoys me that this guy could have been of huge assistance if he just held things close to his chest and then released them after a few months when he was long gone from the firm.

    By the way, for those who care: the Canadian government originally said that Canadians could watch Direct tv all they wanted because DTV didn't have a licence to broadcast here. Now the supreme court has said "Nope" because although they don't have a licence here, it's "wrong" but we still aren't allowed to subscribe because DTV doesn't have sufficient Canadian contend.

    So now approximately 200,000 Canadians have been made criminals in one stroke of a pen.

    • Re:My beef is... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sentry21 ( 8183 )
      And yet despite that, the RCMP has said that they will not be actively prosecuting people who do this. They might confiscate your dish if you make some huge deal out of it, putting up 'fuck the po-lice' signs on your lawn and raising a 'DirectTV Piracy 4 Life' flag over your house, but they honestly don't care one way or the other. You can't go through official channels, but if you break the law, well then shame on you.

      A lot of people might say 'yeah, they say that, but...', and to them I say, if you've lived where I've lived, you'd know that it's impossible to NOT see DirectTV dishes all over the place, from public property, and the RCMP could be throwing fines left and right. Despite this, no one's said a thing. Curious, no? This is just the Supreme Court defending the local broadcasters (Starchoice/Bell) in principle, and encouraging people to support local (national) business, but nothing more.

      --Dan

  • Nobody makes the Robin Hood argument here? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by djembe2k ( 604598 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @06:32PM (#5002101)
    OK, I guess I'll make this argument, even if I don't entirely believe it, because I've read almost every comment to this story to this point, and nobody else is.

    Lots of people are saying "He broke the law, so fry him", but you don't really mean that, because the consensus around here is that some folks who break some laws (i.e. bad laws, laws we don't like) are heroes who don't deserve frying. But this law is a law preventing theft, and since we all agree that theft is bad, and we don't want our stuff stolen, we basically like this law.

    But in this case, what he stole was a description of technology that is going to be used to stifle the flow of information. Somebody could argue that this property doesn't deserve to be protected from theft, and that anybody who steals from the information-rich to give to the information-poor doesn't deserve to be punished.

    If this doesn't prove that the law is bad in general, it proves that this application of this law is protecting an unjust institutionalized system of information as property, when information isn't and shouldn't be treated as property.

    If you treat this as an act of civil disobedience, in the style of MLK, then let the system arrest and punish the guy, so that the system reveals its own injustice to anybody who happens to be watching.

    I'm not sure I buy it myself, but I think it is a serious argument to consider, and so I'll throw it out there, since nobody else seems to be.

  • For those interested (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Str8Dog ( 240982 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @06:51PM (#5002270) Homepage Journal
    You can find good info on the DirecTV hacking scene at PirateDen [pirateden.com] and HackP4 [hackp4.com].

    A lot of these people are ligit suscribers to DirecTV service. They see this as a game, release files to the public and see what Dave counters with. Its your typical hacker scene, more about bragging rights than free TV.

    That is not to say it hasnt caused a black market to spring up. There are lots of scammers out there trying to rip people off. Just search eBay or Google for HU 3m some time.

  • kids today (Score:5, Funny)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland&yahoo,com> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @08:00PM (#5002757) Homepage Journal
    in my day we had to actually work to crack a system. social engineering, scopes, reverse engineering. Not kids today, they just steal the documantation and call themselves hackers.grumble grumble, mutter, wheez

  • Nothing New About Criminal Trade Secrecy Laws (Score:4, Insightful)

    by werdna ( 39029 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @08:39PM (#5003030) Journal
    A common pattern in the threads below is a sense of incredulity that something other than civil remedies are available for misappropriation of a trade secret. Criminal responsibility for trade secret theft is actually quite common, and there are statutes in most states addressing same.

    Usually, DA's have better things to do than to prosecute causes for which civil remedies provide adequate deterrence, relying instead on the private actions to keep honest folks honest. But every now and then, civil remedies fail to adequately encourage good behavior -- particularly when the defendant is effectively judgment-proof -- and a state attorney may decide to try to get someone's attention.

    At any rate, the Economic Espionage Act is simply a Federal law against theft of trade secrets. The remedies are tougher than most analogous state laws, but so are the reqirements. No doubt, the language is somewhat different from uniform acts, but it is hardly anything new or special -- and chances are that if it weren't applicable, one or more state laws would also be relevant.

  • Here's why this may be about your rights... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:37PM (#5003931)
    Here's why this may be about your rights...

    This is about the disclosure of a trade secret by an employee of an employee of a company being prosecuted as if it were an act of industrial espionage by a person employed by a foreign power in order to harm the U.S. industrial base relative to foreign competition.

    There are several problems here:

    1) We don't know if he had legal access to these documents, prior to the disclosure, in the course of his normal work responsibilities, as assigned by his employer.

    2) We don't know if he's the original discloser, or if, assuming he did *not* have legitimate access, the original discloser was someone who left a CDROM sitting in the lunch room, instead of maintaining physical control over the information, as required by due dilligence... making them the discloser.

    3) Trade Secrets have no constitutional protection. This is on purpose. To obtain constitutional protection, you have to file a patent, and agree to lose that protection after the patent expires. The lack of protection is intentional, to encourage disclosure.

    If he went out of his way to steal the documents, that's one thing. If it's simple disclosure, however. which seems likely, then the amount of recourse is (intentionally) limited to damages to the company, recoverable from him personally.

    In any case, now that the information is disclosed, it's disclosed: it's in the public domain. The company has the right (in the U.S.) to file patent, up to a year following first public disclosure. Foreign patents, except for Japan, are now impossible -- if they weren't imposssible as software patents everywhere else (except Japan, again), anyway.

    Personally, I doubt he had to violate the law to obtain the information, and I doubt that he profitted from the disclosure, and I doubt foreign companies will profit from the disclosure. So this is a likely an attempt to bludgeon him for the disclosure, using an inappropriate law.

    On the other hand, it's likely that no one will hire him for an NDA position, ever again, even if he didn't violate NDA through the disclosure (by being a person who picked up a CDROM that was not dilligently stored or protected by someone else). That's as it should be.

    In any case...

    The reason that makes this about your rights, is that Trade Secrets are not Constitutionally entitled to the level of preotection that is being attempted to be enforced in this case.

    We should be wary of any attempts to increase legal protections for Trade Secrets, without some benefit to society, in trade (and that's what Patents and Copyrights are intended to do). Permitting a company to obtain (in effect) patent protection without the disclosure required for patent protection is simply wrong.

    -- Terry

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