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1996 Economic Espionage Act and DirectTV
Pharmboy writes "The Register reports a 19 year old will plead guilty to the
1996 Economic Espionage Act for giving away DirectTV secrets, even though they admit he did not pirate the service or profit from the theft." See our original story on this case.
Yes gentlemen
Thank you all for coming here today
The bidding for these DIRECTV SECRETS
Will begin at
ONE MILLION DOLLARS
MUAH HA HA HA
No, spice network is extra.
Who are y oo ?
Oh, fuck it, I'm a liberal and I'll blast Bush anyway for an isolated case of judicial abuse! It doesn't have to make sense!!!
This poor idiot would have had his hands cut off in Russia.
And let's be clear -- this WAS an act of corporate espionage. He knowingly stole trade secrets from his work and posted them online. Put him in jail, and any hippies who think what he did was right, you can go join him.
So what he didn't profit or use the service, he still illegally obtained trade secrets and distributed them to those who would try and profit, or at least enabled those who are trying to steal service. Now he's caught and is being punished. The lesson learned here: Actions lead to Consequences.
The kid's a moron if he got caught. Obviously illegal and obviously helpful. 7x7: making poor judgement calls with the worst of them.
Secret 1: There's nothing on, ever
Secret 2: The history channel is concerned with the history of hitler, the occult, UFOs and the secrets of the pyramids only
Secret 3: You're fat
Secret 4: There's still nothing on
Who are y oo ?
Perhaps he should get some kind of special award from the industry. Like the RIAA Platinum IP Theft Award. "See- we're not paranoid! There really are criminals out there! We need all the protection we can get!"
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
You cut your OWN hands off!
He is no more innocent than someone who gets a bunch of people's cc#'s and makes them public. Just because he personally didn't financially benefit is totally beyond the point. Just because he did it against a "large faceless/heartless corp" and many "common folk just trying to exercise their god given right to watch ESPN" benefitted doesn't make it any more right.
Yes, because we all know how wrong DeCSS was.
It may or may not be true that information wants to be free, but it is definitely true that 19 year-old kids want to do stupid things.
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It was in the form of a memo:
To: CEO of DirectTV
From: Quality Assurance Engineer
Re: Our service
CEO,
I regret to inform you that our product is inferior, and should not be purchased. I pray no one gets wind of this discovery.
~QA
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I'm all for this.
This case should not be confused with an independent person doing a "clean room" reverse engineering of the technology. This person was in a position of trust and violated that trust by stealing something that didn't belong to him.
It's irrelevant that he did not profit from this. The cost to DirecTV is the same whether he used the information himself or passed it on to someone else who did.
Why is this in YRO again? What rights online does this concern?
It's also not a trade secret if ANYONE outside the company or its suppliers knows the information. In this case, they did.
Apple often gets in trouble this way. It's their own employees that leak the information out a lot of times. The whole website MacWhispers has been created on the basis of "manufacturing partner tips" - that's economic espionage and Apple should shut that site down. MacWhispers is and does profit off this information. Apple CLEARLY loses money based on rumor sites and their "investigations"
I honestly don't see this boy's information as any more than common technical knowledge that was already on the internet.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Blatantly misused as a sledgehammer to try and "shock and awe" the satellite TV community now.
If it still don't make sense, then you're not paying attention. Of course, I'm still not sure what blash is.
if they just offered ever channel for $119.99 a month , the piracy would be cut in half, and yes, that is including the ppv's
Impacts?
Giving away a hack to a TV box: Lost revenues for a satellite company.
Giving away high tech secrets: Future possibility of incoming with a payload carried by our own technology.
Which is really a worse outcome?
So our junior genius is working with a client's tip-top-secret documents, 10,000-to-1 he's signed some heavy-duty non-disclosure agreement and knows his uncle's company could get fried if anything leaks, yet he decided to make a hobby out of sending copies of the documents to the whole world.
I'll agree that the law's a poor fit, and this young kid's whole life is toasted bad, but I feel sorry for him about like I feel sorry for the guy who tried pissin' on a 100,000 volt line knocked down in a storm.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
This was a law that was designed to prevent foreign companies from conducting espionage on American companies. Courts are supposed to (and generally do) take into account the intent of a law when they are overseeing a case. Stopping copyright infringement was not the intent of this law.
This was a case of *civil* law. Criminal law shouldn't be involved. He violated his employer's trust, which is a civil matter.
Do you know why they didn't pursue it in civil court? I would imagine that it is because they weren't damaged by his actions. (Because their system was good enough that people couldn't break it even with the information that he leaked.) They would therefore be unable to land a serious verdict, so they went the criminal way. And the US government went along with it, as it does.
Yes, and DeCSS was created to a certain extent by hard work, not simply scarfed up and fed to the masses. It also has a legitimate use beyond piracy (e.g. open-source DVD players).
The thing that makes cases like this evil is the fact that people will compare it to similar - but different in important ways - cases like deCSS. It just gives the copyright/etc lawyers more reason to attack. This person should be shunned not only by those in power, but also by those working hard to make legitimate products.
From my (brief) reading of the Act, there are two interesting things to consider:
First, it is weaker than the DMCA in that it requires "theft" whereas the DMCA prohibits the "breaking and entering" part of defeating copy protection.
Second, it appears stronger than the DMCA because acts can fall under its scope even if somebody is outside the U.S. Check out Section 1837... This chapter also applies to conduct occurring outside the United States if-- An act in furtherance of the offense was committed in the United States.. Hmm.... so if the information is posted to a newsgroup located in the U.S., does that count as an act committed within the U.S. in furtherance of the offense, even if the actor is in Ecuador?
Ouch!
-A
Ok yeah, they mention this, but why not include the fact that the FNNC has all but relinquished control of the TS lines? Someone afraid to tell the *whole* truth? Maybe.
Rubbish. That information was not in the public domain - didn't you read the article? DirectTV went to extraordinary lengths to protect it, and being part of the sealed records of a court case doesn't mitigate that, otherwise every company who had a technical secret would be sued by their competitors.
The author of this story blurb makes it sound like he was arrested by G-Men for reverse-engineering his satellite dish, not for stealing priveleged information from a legal firm! Clearly a criminal act.
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
I would do, but I'm out of points.
The parent post captures the interesting aspect of the case -- i.e. that a crime that could be only weakly punished by civil law (because only marginal damage was done) was simply reinterpreted as a national security issue, and hey presto! a strong punishment.
Not that the kid wasn't a twit, you understand.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The Enron executives. ...
The Worldcom executives
Those pump and dump wallstreet brokers from the 90s.
These guys do far more damage than this kid ever did to our economy yet they will get far less severe punishment. What this kid did was wrong but I don't these others should be let off any easier.
From the article:
"These weren't just instructions like, 'do this and do that.' He was putting up the actual changes to make to the card -- specific code bytes that needed to be changed," says Zwillinger. "People say you should be able to log onto the Internet and say anything. But if you go on the Internet and admit to misconduct, that's called a confession."IANAL, but my sister is, and her three rules are:
Never confess.Never confess!
NEVER CONFESS !!Her fourth rule is: Since it's illegal to lie to a policeman, if you're caught red-handed say nothing. Refuse to answer questions, demand an attorney, but never confess. A confession makes things soooo easy for the prosecutor.
So how is posting something to the Internet, not under oath and without Miranda rights, considered a confession?You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
I find it interesting that nearly every is coming out against this guy. While I whole heartedly agree that what he did was wrong, and that he should be punished, there seems to be a bit of a double standard.
Read any article on the RIAA cracking down on P2P services and you will get a much more mixed set of opinions.
Is this really that different from downloading music for which you have not paid? True, he 'stole' trade secrets, while MP3 are a product. However, either way, the issue is with the loss of income from the company.
Just something to consider...
(on a side note, I include myself in the 'double standard' group)
This case seems inappropriate in the same way charging a common mugger with assassination or treason for happening to kill a political leader is inappropiate.
Certainly he deserves to be in trouble. That doesn't mean that every crime involving a similar action necessarily applies.
The problem isn't that he's getting prosecuted for theft. If he were I'm all for that, he probably stole those CDR's, wasted hours of his employers time, etc. But he's being prosecuted for profiting from the copying, when he clearly did not. He wasn't paid for releasing the information, he probably even lost money on the whole thing. I personally think there should be some legal punishment for what he did, he certainly betrayed a trust and we should discourage this type of damage. There may be a legal punishment for all I know. But, he has been prosecuted for something everyone knows he didn't do, that worries me greatly.
Mom, I told you to stay off my interweb!
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so and so will be prosecuted for theft, or maybe armed robbery, not for "Economic Espionage", whatever that is. In a bank robbery, a bank and its customers lose money. In Economic Espionage, the company is faced with a possible loss of revenue if potential customers use pirate boxes instead of subscribing to their service. The actual loss is gonna be difficult to compute. Especially difficult if the availability of pirate boxes advertises their service to a wider audience and contributed to increased sales.
Not that I'm advocating what happened, mind you, just pointing out a problem with the comparison.
If you were guilty of assault, would you want be be charged with manslaughter because it was easier for the prosecution to nail you, even though nobody actually died?
Dyolf Knip
Gee, and here I thought espionage had to be international.
Yep. He gets books written about him and then Errol Flynn plays him in a movie.
Thanks to this 19 year for the info , I know of people who crack DirectTV on a daily basis, one being a roommate in the same house.
Even though he did not benefit from the Theft of Trade secrects, my roommate did cuz he's not paid a single dime to direc TV other than the occassional hunt for a Virgin Sim CARD to crack when the Sattelite sweep hits the switch at 2 am to interupt the illegal subscribers but with the computer just seconds a way, a nother cracked sim card is within my grasp.
One simple solution to this is use PKI or public key infrastructure which can issue a new certificate to the sim CARD every 24 hour period, but that would be too simple.
In other words this 19 year old is the single reason for DirectTV losing billions to those crack programs that my roommate uses. And he's not even technicaly inclined, he's usings some sort of kitty scripting program that with a few clicks and waiting for about 10 minutes for it to fine a good cracked sim and EUREKA! You have free PORN all night on TV from Spice, to hotzone, to playboy, and much much more free pay per view tv and not a single dime goes to DIRECT TV.
Thanks 19 year old. I strongly believe my roommate should stop this immoral behavior and even left him web site print outs of people being arrested by the FBI cuz its a felony in California, yet he is not detered since its just seems so simple to CRACK and nothing more too it.
CIAO
I fully expected to read the article and find out that the kid had just cleverly reverse-engineered stuff as a hobby, making him a poor persecuted martyr. I really did.
But, that perception was WRONG. This kid had access to sensitive trade secrets. I see absolutely nothing defensible that he did. I would love if someone would explain to me how it should be perfectly OK to steal trade secrets and publish them. I suggest starting with the always persuasive "patents, copyrights, and secrets want to be FREE" argument.
So I'm waiting for the "misuse" argument. To me, the fact that they only went after a kid who really is a thief gives them credibility.
Honestly, I would love to hear from someone who actually read the article and feels otherwise.
There is something inherently deceitful about this young man's behavior and he should be punished for it.
That said, lets look at the laws.
It's called the Economic Espionage Act. The fact that it's wording can be made to fit this crime since Canadians will benefit from it doesn't speak to it's intent.
Interviewer: "Congressman, this law that your working on, the one that can only be used with approval from the Justice Department for curbing Espionage, is it designed to be applied to 19 year kids who steal secrets from the Entertainment Industry?"
The congressfolk involved would not have their work so trivialized. Protecting DirectTV from Canadians was not the intent of that law. They obviously left it overly-broad to relieve the justice department of the need to prove that it was benefiting a particular person or agency. If, for instance, we were at war with France and I was found sneaking GPS decryption secrets (to improve the accuracy of GPS guided cheese-bombs) across the French border, I could be convicted under this act without any particular recipient being proven. But it's worth noting: We are not at war with Canada.
The congressfolk in question probably felt comfortable leaving the terminology overbroad because of the barrier imposed by limiting it to cases approved by the Justice Department for it's use, "...a limitation that was lifted in March, 2002." Which seems to be when it became popular to assume we are always at war. Being popular does not make it right.
DirecTV's lawyer claims, "I imagine most people who steal get paid for it, or somehow profit by it... but it's the theft that's the crime. There's no more appropriate statute to use in this case."
Yes. There is. Newsflash lawyerboy: Theft is already illegal. So there are many many more appropriate statues available. Theft of trade secrets has been a crime for some time and in other cases companies have gotten away with suing for years worth of R&D that were lost due to the secrets getting out, and those penalties were certainly non-trivial.
The victory here has nothing to do with plugging a leak that lets those Evil Canadians (who apparently aren't worth the bother to provide service to) watch free T.V. The victory has everything to do with attaching Espionage to Entertainment theft. This is an ugly connection. When well established, it will allow the unprecedented monitoring capabilities of the federal government to be applied to any Digital Rights circumvention.
And it would seem this has already occurred to them:
"But Marc Zwillinger, the chief litigator in DirecTV's war on piracy, says Ump25's posts aren't much different from posting a DVD descrambling program to the Internet, which has been ruled illegal in the past."
Now, or sometime in the near future, if you watch DVDs using Linux, you're not only violating the DMCA, since you trafficked in illegal copies of decss with "foreign powers" you're also a spy. If there are millions of spys among us, does that not make it easy to justify giving the Justice Department even broader interception and monitoring capabilities?
I don't use drugs; I don't hire prostitutes; I don't dump my employers secrets out on the Internet for public consumption. And I never will.
If chosen for jury duty, I will enter an unswaying not-guilty vote for anyone on trial for:
Possession of Cannabis.
Prostitution.
Espionage with countries with which we are not at war.
Not to protect my right to commit these crimes, but because the cost to our society for having laws like these is too great.
With this b.s. lawsuit happening to IBM from SCrOtum, any bets on whether IBM is also guilty of this "crime" too. After all they must have given trade secrets to Linux which are now spread all over the planet, and undoubtedly now gone into the hands of foreign terrorists too.
watch out now, or someone's liable to open up a can of RTFA on your arse.
The law was passed in 1996. The kid was arrested on Jan. 2, 2003. The P4 smart card is rather recent, so the theft was probably committed late in 2002.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
This has nothing to do with violating freedom or any other right we supposedly have under the constitution.
he used his position within DirecTV to gain access to secret, confidential information, and leaked it to someone. What that someone did, or whether or not he benfitted is immaterial. He violated NDA from DirecTV, and violated that law.
Just like if someone posted a source code module from Windows 2003, the secret recipie of Mickey D's Secret Sauce, or anything else confidential.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
from the corporations..
he did not work for direcTV, he worked for an outside legal firm that was hired for an UNRELATED incident, he was an office assitant making photo-copies, he was a MINOR at the time of the violation, though he is 19 now, so the NDA does not hold water, HIS UNCLE, a partner in the law firm SHOULD be the one in trouble, he HAD lawyer/client relationship with the DirecTV and then allowed the documents into INSECURE hands.
I do agree that this IS NOT a freedom of speech issue or a constitutional one though...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
yeah.. i think i misread that one. whoops...
As other posts have pointed out, he isn't actually being prosecuted for benefiting from his theft; he's being prosecuted for damaging the company he stole from and possibly benefiting foreign governments and companies in the process. He violated exactly the law under which he's being prosecuted. He also very likely violated several other laws, but this is the one under which DirecTV chose to prosecute him, and that's their prerogative.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
I can vouch for that.
/. it: Priceless.
Fancy computer: $3300 (including monitor)
One year of Internet service in my dorm room: $59.
Lots of open source software: free.
Vast quantities of music: $1200+, and many hours on P2P networks.
DVD rip of The Two Towers: free.
Constructing an FTP server for my amusement, and letting my college's network take the strain as I
(Sorry, the school year's over and I don't think my home DSL connection can take that kind of abuse.)
--
Six, Four-foot rubber bands: free.
Eight-foot galvanized steel poles, other equipment: ~$40.
Constructing a huge slingshot so powerful that water balloons break as soon as they're released: Priceless.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
Actually, nowhere in the nice fluffy article does it state what confidentiality agreements he did or did not sign or what obligations he had to the firm, or what he did or didn't know and willingly do. Its hardly "espionage" if these documents (supposedly confidential, supposedly so secret that they were only printed on special paper -- but clearly not if they were being entered into a digital imaging system!...) came across his desk without any warning about their protected nature; if these had been documents about chemical waste disposal, he would be getting kudos for revealing them, a fact that exposes the highly political nature of what are called "trade secrets" -- (anyone remember when Apple threatened to sue people who distributed their dealer price lists?). The (very false and 1984 newspeakish) idea that a secret is a physical thing that can be "stolen" is quite a big stick to hand an industry that should be responsible for maintaining its own secrets via procedures and common sense (there is, at least, nothing "secret" about a price list that sits on top of the secretary's desk at 5,000 distributors).
On the other hand, if he knew what he was handling was confidential, and/or had signed agreements -- as is likely the case-- then that is an entirely different story and his lawyers have no business claiming a "childish mistake." If he knew what he was doing he should face some appropriate punishment (with consideration of his age), and the law firm probably should get some heat as well for the negligence of having a 19 year old in such a position. (Unlikely to happen as DirectTV probably doesn't want to piss off the firm, but it should happen).
But as usual, the devil of this case is in details that the reporter didn't seem to bother to inquire about, and it's rather sensational to have this case represented as governmental abuse etc. without those details
Cool, straight answers. I'll bite.
1. Because government is not benign. Government's goal is to remain in power, and will use property it siezes by force from its citizens to further that goal.
I hear you. I think that a more majority-representative system might be successfully devised however. Consider a democracy where the only system of representation would be via dynamically-assignable-to-the-moment (or thereabouts)proxy voting. No official-machinery-composed of officials at all (maybe contracters).
2. Because government is not efficient. If it is the sole provider of these services, it becomes a monopoly with no reason to be good at any of them.
Likewise I think that this aspect might be overcome with the right system. I think the fact that a centralized focus of power is to blame. A perfectly distributed system of government could avoid turning into a parasitical energy-sink which seeks to blow maximum-smoke up it's own ass. A centralized govermment can only evolve into a maximized parasite which unaboidably strangles itself, brain-first. If a robust perfectly-distributed power structure could be devised, more robust than any inevitable power sub-blocs; like a body resists infectious cultures- that would do it.
3. Because socialism removes an individual's incentive to achieve. If a person works hard to attain goals, and sees the result of his/her effort given to someone who has not earned it, what reason is there to work hard in the first place?
I see your point but I think that an efficient system would make the support of the couch-potatos a trivial task, make much labor that is necessary now, unnecessary. And besides, I don't know what your experience with "artistic labor" is but it's the great "unwork". Great thinkers/artists/inventors, argueable the most productive citizens in any society, do it for fun (Thomas Edison notwithstanding, and one might argue that he just dug the businessman game alot). A good "socialist" system would free millions of repressed creative types, that is, everyone, to grow and excel. Look at the tragedy of the open-source programmer, too mindfucked after a day of writing shit code for some shit corporation to write something beautiful.
4. Forced egalitarianism means that innovation is stifled.
I'm not understanding here. You saying that without the attraction of being "one of the wealthy guys" people will cease to create? Surely not!
5. Because making people dependent on government is not helping them.
Dependent like we are on air and gravity? Really, I don't think it would be a problem. I don't think that our culture needs to maintain a red-in-tooth-and-claw contest to evolve or for people to be happy.
focus schmocus
This kid committed espionage and he's being charged with an espionage related crime using an espionage related law. Don't get too excited about it. This isn't reverse enginnering, this isn't applying liberal "fair use" to otherwise public documents, this is the outright theft of documents that the public were never meant to see, and wouldn't if he hadn't made illegal copies of them.
A 19 year old broke a technology related law. It happens. There's really nothing newsworthy about this, unless there was some implied wrongdoing by the authorities, but that certainly doesn't seem to apply here.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
As far as I'm concerned, if the kid stole secrets, that's tough noogies for the people he stole it from. It still should not be a crime to steal a "trade secret".
The kid should get fired, maybe even sued in civil court (although I'm probably opposed to even that) but in no way should this be a criminal offense.
Unless of course the kid actually physically removed physical documents from the office - that would be physical theft and thus criminal. If, however, he just copied them and/or scanned them and/or burned them to CD from digital copies on some computer somewhere, that is not theft. You can call it a variety of things, but it ain't property theft.
If you don't want your secrets stolen, keep them encrypted and exercise control over who can decrypt them. Using the state to do your dirty work for you because you failed to exercise due diligence in the conduct of your business is fascism...
Remember, morons, this sort of thing sets legal precedents which will then be used against YOU in a case where those precedents should not apply. That is one of the ways the state expands its power and reduces freedom. Look under the RICO statutes for examples...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The reason why the law used was not just common theft is obvious. If the charge was common theft then all the lawyers in IT companies would need to hire vets to deliver millions of kittens. Was he a virgin, or was he not? How much original code did he steal? The current goings on in IT encription are the most fleeting secrets of all. The satelite TV industry cannot afford to start a flame war of litigation over their technologies, which might be shown to have been lifted from other sources in the first place. Far better to involve the Government at the highest level rather than risk the lower courts chucking out the case. It is far easier to keep the public and competitors in the dark, by using secrets act legislation.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!