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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!!!
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.
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.
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.
Best Windows Freeware
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?
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.
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
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
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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 ?