3 ms·
Of course harm will come to me, the point is that those doing the harm should still be held accountable if they're caught. Yes the law is far from perfect and
by gph 11y ago
Of course harm will come to me, the point is that those doing the harm should still be held accountable if they're caught.
Yes the law is far from perfect and it's easy to imagine absurd scenarios like yours where the law falls apart. Certainly that should be fixed. But in this particular case Weev knew he was going onto a portion of the webpage that wasn't meant to be public, even if technically anyone could access it because of AT&T's ineptitude. There weren't any links to that exact URL, and in a sense it took some reverse engineering (ok basically just guess and check) for him to find it. It wasn't a public webpage in the sense that he stumbled upon it from some link or a google search. He put thought into purposefully discovering that exact URL and opening it, knowing as a computer security enthusiast that it wasn't meant for public consumption.
- msandford 11y agoI'm afriad I have to respectfully disagree with the idea that "he should have known better". Most analogies fall flat because webservers do EXACTLY WHAT YOU TELL THEM even if what you tell them to do isn't what you actually want them to do. Our laws are generally organized around the idea of reasonable adults doing reasonable things and being understood by other reasonable people. The average, reasonable person can't comprehend a webserver. If you give a robot a gun and tell it to shoot anything that comes through that door and it shoots your wife/husband/child/parent, its not them who is at fault nor is it the robot. Its your fault and you should be tried for murder. I hope the comparison is clear.
- gph 11y ago>The average, reasonable person can't comprehend a webserver. But weev could. We don't apply laws as if the defendant is some mythical "reasonable" person. We try each case based on it's unique circumstances. It's not that he "should have known better", it's that he absolutely did know better. The comparison is clear, but it has no relevance.
- msandford 11y ago> But weev could. We don't apply laws as if the defendant is some mythical "reasonable" person. What weev could or could not do is 100% irrelevant. What matters with regard to the law is what a reasonable person would do. That's literally a thing. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/reasonable http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/reasonable AT&T's customers had a REASONABLE expectation of privacy in general, and quite likely AT&T had a privacy policy which spelled this out. AT&T failed to take the proper steps to protect their customers privacy. AT&T is at fault here, not weev. Even if weev did know or not know something, AT&T is at fault for the situation where his knowing or not knowing makes a lick of difference.