The earliest instance I remember was the DeCSS debacle. In 2001 Dmitry Sklyarov published issues he found with the back-then popular so-called "copy protections

The earliest instance I remember was the DeCSS debacle. In 2001 Dmitry Sklyarov published issues he found with the back-then popular so-called "copy protections". When he gave a talk at DEF CON in Las Vegas, he was arrested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd. The irony in this story couldn't be bigger: - He is a Russian who exercised free speech in the US, and got arrested right there. Imagine that happening with the roles of US and Russia reversed! - He was only dropped from prosecution in exchange for agreeing to testify and to leave the US. Again, imagine that happening with the roles of US and Russia reversed! - He essentially provided free research, sharing their findings with the public, instead of abusing them in private. - It was not even a serious security issue. It was just a flaw in a system which nobody expected to work for long anyway. (Really, how could copy protection ever work without exercising full control over all audio and video hardware? And even those could be reverse engineered over time.) - Plain copyright law was sufficient to cause all that trouble for him. No computer security laws or homeland security laws were needed.