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."

Comments

The weakest link in security

[bobdotorg]

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.

Re:Sounds about right.

[Bruce Perens]

And by the way, since we're speaking about industrial espionage, is ESR's involvement with the Haloween memos - which presumably he received from a Microsoft employee and published - industrial espionage? I think technically it might be, although MS has more to lose from charging him than it does from leaving him alone. Unless, of course, they are delibrate leaks.

Bruce

Big Discrepancy

[LinuxHam]

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.

Re:Sounds about right.

[afidel]

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.

Nobody makes the Robin Hood argument here?

[djembe2k]

OK, I guess I'll make this argument, even if I don't entirely believe it, because I've read almost every comment to this story to this point, and nobody else is.

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.