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Let me pose another scenario. Say you have a journalist who suspects a company is doing something not kosher or has a big acquisition coming. That company has

by rsingel 14y ago

Let me pose another scenario. Say you have a journalist who suspects a company is doing something not kosher or has a big acquisition coming. That company has a strict policy that employees may not talk to the press without permission. Despite that the journalist probes, he tries a bunch of people, he then finds someone inside the company who is willing to talk and reveal the company is doing something unethical or is going to buy a company. The journalist then publishes that info and hopes, as a sign of the power of the story, that it is market-moving news. In an e-mail to an editor, she jokes that they ought to short the company. Or if you are Mark Cuban's short-lived venture, one actually shorts the company. Given the journalist has exceeded authorized access to an employee and hoped to do damage to a company, should that journalist be prosecuted and charged with a felony? If not, why is Weev being charged with a felony for doing the same exact thing by getting the info from a publicly available server that had no password protection?

davesims 14y ago
A journalist is protected by freedom of speech and freedom of association. We are not, no the other hand, free to take and publish data that is not ours from, for instance, filing cabinets or servers, no matter how good or bad the security is. A better example would be a competitor walking into an open office, opening a filing cabinet, taking yearly accounting reports and publishing them right before an IPO in order to tank the stock value. This is much closer to what weev actually did. To follow your analogy further, the Chinese spies who socially engineered access to RSA's security hashes wouldn't be guilty either. A security hole, like an open door, is not a tacit abdication of rights to a company's data, nor a tacit invitation to do any and all kinds of harm to the company with that data, nor a tacit surrender of all legal means to recoup damages resulting from the stolen data.

by rsingel 14y ago

davesims 14y ago

A journalist is protected by freedom of speech and freedom of association. We are not, no the other hand, free to take and publish data that is not ours from, for instance, filing cabinets or servers, no matter how good or bad the security is. A better example would be a competitor walking into an open office, opening a filing cabinet, taking yearly accounting reports and publishing them right before an IPO in order to tank the stock value. This is much closer to what weev actually did. To follow your analogy further, the Chinese spies who socially engineered access to RSA's security hashes wouldn't be guilty either. A security hole, like an open door, is not a tacit abdication of rights to a company's data, nor a tacit invitation to do any and all kinds of harm to the company with that data, nor a tacit surrender of all legal means to recoup damages resulting from the stolen data.