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Russian Student Arrested For Revealing DirecTV Secrets
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."
he stole it out right. if some guy robs me I would hope that he gets the book thrown at him.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
"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?
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
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.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
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.
What an idiot. This is the exact kind of case that should put the kid in jail. He STOLE trade secrets and distributed them. By economic gain, couldn't it be argued that the distribution of these documents could lead to people getting free DirecTV service, thus providing them with an economic gain?
Throw the book at the ruskie!
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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".
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.
Well, maybe not *that* big, but ABC News is reporting 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 for alternative versions of the story.
Intelligent Life on Earth
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)?
sigs are a waste of space
breach of an NDA is a tort, or civil penalty. What he did goes beyond that and is industrial espionage, which is a criminal charge. I can break an NDA without commiting industrial espionage and only have to pay whatever monetary penalties a judge orders. This is similar to OJ being found not guilty of the criminal charge of murder but responsible for wrongfull death, he serves no jail time but he does have to pay the families of the victims a very large sum of money.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Is there a web site somewhere that summarizes this kind of stupidity? Something similar to the "Darwin Awards" would be nice.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
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.
Which begets the question: is the a legal recourse for punishing those who publish confidential documents, but never did sign a confidentiality agreement in order to get them?
Well, yes. Don't mix up two different things. An NDA is contract law, a civil tort is usually the result of violation. This guy is being charged under criminal law apparently. Criminal law is supposed to punish and discourage crimes against society, civil law's goal is to make the damaged party "whole" again.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
A couple of things bother me about this. Why is a federal prosecution needed, when California already has strong laws against trade secret theft? Why did federal prosecutors need high-level approval in DC to apply this law, unless the DoJ knows that the law is overbroad and easily abused? Why did a law firm even have these documents, unless there was already some dispute about them? How are the feds going to prove economic espionage when that entails proving economic benefit, when the Russian did not economically benefit and it is not clear how anyone else might have economically benefitted either?
I think everyone is missing a fundamental point here: The dam that is technological content protection or access control can be easily burst... as shown by this case (especially if any infringing technology shows up) and the DeCSS case. The development of DeCSS allowed content to be copied by the end-user (even if poorly) and, once the program was out, there was no going back... In this light, it doesn't seem that hard to imagine the entertainment industry advocating draconian legislation like the DMCA, CBDTPA, and the Berman Bill. Yikes...
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
Sounds like our American friends pinching the credit for being first in something again :-)... AFAIK the first working, widely used industrial standard (discounting myths about Roman roads etc.) was the Whitworth thread, or "British
Standard Whitworth" (still in use today) from Sir Joseph Whitworth in 1841. Standards in screw threads made possible
huge simplifications in industrial processes.
Before this time standards and interchangeable parts were almost impossible, because craftsman made parts 'to fit'. (The parrallels with computer programming today are striking :-) ).
A nice article about how the Americans then decided to reinvent their own standard at wired: Turn of the Century
The story is that the whole thing was kicked off to a large extent by the mass manufacturing needed to create the Babbage engine, and Whitworth's experiences working on it... Babbage and Whitworth and machining and stuff
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.