McOwen Case Settled

ewilts writes: "Back in July, you ran a story about David McOwen, a computer adminstrator at DeKalb Technical College in Georgia, who was being charged for installing SETI software on school computers. This case has now been settled. See also the EFF press release on McOwen's web site." Update: 01/18 16:11 GMT by M : It was software from distributed.net, not SETI.

Comments

Re:Powerful implications

[Erasmus Darwin]

"how the heck can you charge a sysadmin with hacking into a system that they have full privleges to in the first place?"

Having full system access (such as 'root' on a *NIX box) does not always translate into having full authority (i.e. direct permission from real humans) to do all actions that are permitted by that level of access. The anti-hacking law he was charged under most likely has a clause about using a computer system in excess of the user's authority.

For example, while a sysadmin may have root access to a system that he must maintain, he may not necessarily be permitted to use that access to snoop through the VP's mail spool. Similarly, a McDonald's employee that has the restaurant keys so he can lock up at night is still trespassing if he abuses those keys to throw a wild party there at 4am. Finally, it's still car theft if a chauffer decides to just drive away with the car that he's got full physical access to.

What it all boils down to is how explicitly defined the sysadmin's authority was in this matter.