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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 ?
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.
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.
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?
A group of ppl. trying to justify their moral/religious convictions as laws, will always create problems, be they democrtats/republicans or any-one for that matter.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
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?
How can I blash Bush or Ashcroft for a bad law passed during Clinton's time as president?
.0001 percent of the population who are so smart that they don't have to worry about being fired. Sadly they've never had the chance to learn about compassion, or being human.
No no, back up. In Clinton's days these laws were a lot like marijuana statutes. They were very rarely enforced, and when they were it ammounted to a slap on the wrist.
Now that George W. Orwell and friends are in charge, these laws have been convoluted into a completely different picture. Now any kind of intellectual curiousity is treated like a "bad taillight" in which a cop can harrass you for being what you are. Intellectuals, the middle-class, and computer professionals are the last demographic republicans want to hear from.
The internet is a threat to any regime whose existence depends on the falsification of information. The funny thing is, so many Slashdotters here claim to be republican. They're either scared shitless over losing thier jobs, so they say "hiel hitler!" I don't need healthcare, I like working 70 hrs a week, I like living with my parents. Or they are the
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
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.
If they were passed with no intention of being enforced, what was the point?
What is worse saying "I'll pretend to believe this and do nothing about it" or "I'll follow the laws that are on the books regardless."?
As far as the rest, I hate to break it to you but the Federal Government was not supposed to guarantee anything close to free healthcare and mandated work weeks and wages. The US was not founded with the idea that "everyone is free because we will give everyone everything they need" it was founded with the idea that if you leave people alone they will pull themselves up by the bootstraps and make their own lives better.
HTTP Status 418
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.
I think you screwed up that quote. It is: 'A government of the people, by the people', not 'A government of the social-worker bureaucrats, for the benefit of the social-worker bureaucrats so they can meddle in people's affairs with theories they learned when they should have been courses with actual value in college.'
The point: The Nanny State needs to wither away. Cutting off it's money supply is a start. The number of times feeble attempts to turn 'Tax Cuts' into a bad thing in 'intellectual' circles is staggering.
You see, that is the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals. Instead of whining about how many refrigerators a rich guy has, why don't you take some responsibility and try to better your situation? Everybody has plenty of opportunity for wealth- it just takes effort. Poor people are not poor because some rich person stepped all over them. In fact, thats the attitude that keeps them poor.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
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.
One of the guys was using a circular saw and it caught an edge, which whipped the saw down and nearly cut this guy's thumb off. He was taken to the hospital, and treated. He's now been working 3 years, and all of his money goes toward food, rent...and paying his hospital debt.
OK, your father hired a contractor who obviously didn't have the right insurance cover. The contractor screwed up, causing expensive damage not covered by his insurance, and is now having to pay for fixing the damage. Seems fair.
Still think this is a civilized country?
Yes: this guy is paying for his own mistake, instead of the government forcing others to cover for him. My one criticism here is that they really should have been required to carry appropriate insurance, but that's very difficult to enforce - why didn't your father check that, by the way?
Supposing, instead of a thumb, that saw had cut a water main, ruining the house. Would you expect other people to foot the bill for fixing that, too?
(Also, I'd point out nothing bad came of that, despite his stupidity: he was treated (despite not having insurance or the money to pay for it) - now he's working to make up for it. Nothing wrong with that.
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 ?