Senate Hacker Blames Boss

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday September 16, 2004 @07:34AM from the pointing-fingers dept.

expriest writes "Manuel Miranda, the Republican Senate staffer under invesitgation for hacking into confidential Democratic files, has sued John Ashcroft to enjoin him against continuing the investigation. Miranda's argument consists of little more than fingerpointing. "Senators used all their official power and their influence over the press" says Miranda's complaint, "to disguise their own wrongdoing, by systematically accusing plaintiff of escalating degrees of criminality." "

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Still Isn't Right by alatesystems · 2004-09-16 07:41 · Score: 5, Insightful

According to Boston News, he allegedly "infiltrated Democratic Judiciary Committee computer files" and copied "thousands of memos and passing some on to the media".

He says he was "just following orders" as a previous poster has said, and that they should be in court instead of him. They should be in court WITH him.

Even though someone told him to do something that he knew was wrong, he allegedly did it anyway. I hate when people cop-out by saying "I was just following orders."

"You know, the Nazis had pieces of flare they made the Jews wear."

Chris
1. Re:Still Isn't Right by justkarl · 2004-09-16 07:48 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Even though someone told him to do something that he knew was wrong, he allegedly did it anyway. I hate when people cop-out by saying "I was just following orders."
  
  I agree...to a point. Instead of doing something that he knew was wrong(translate=unethical/illegal) Miranda could have chosen to "tell on" his boss. But then he's at risk of losing his job(obviously) or perhaps something worse. The corruption's out there, but one has to follow the system enough to make a living. Would you sacrifice a sweet paycheck for doing something unethical? The answer may not be something we can decide so easily if we're not in a similar situation.
2. Re:Still Isn't Right by kalidasa · 2004-09-16 08:36 · Score: 2
  
  1. I've lived in New England for 37 years, and I've never heard of an outlet called "the Boston News".
  2. The links I see on these stories are to an AP report. AP is not a Boston-based institution.
3. Re:Still Isn't Right by lynx_user_abroad · 2004-09-16 08:39 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  You [hang] three or four politicians for corruption, the political landscape will change so fast it'll make the presidential elections look like a bingo game.
  
  Unfortunately, that's one of the problems with corruption: if a corrupt system starts hanging people it calls corrupt, can we ever be sure the correct people are being hanged?
  Do we trust the inmates of the asylum to decide who is sane?
  I rue the day my children will look at me and ask Dad, how could you have let this happen on your watch?
  
  --
  The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
4. Re:Still Isn't Right by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2004-09-16 08:55 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  It's kind of a special case when the person investigating you for the alleged wrongdoing is the same person who allegedly gave you the order.
  
  --
  The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
5. Re:Still Isn't Right by Doc+Ruby · 2004-09-16 18:13 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Here's a specific hypothetical question for you: would you crack the opposition party computers to spy on their secret memos so you could stuff the courts with judges not only "sympathetic" to your ideology, but also owing you a favor? Or would you quit, and take your unparalleled resume to another job where you weren't only unethical, but also didn't help to destroy your country?
  
  --
  --
  make install -not war
6. Re:Still Isn't Right by Zeinfeld · 2004-09-17 01:41 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  There was no "infiltration" involved. The memos were happily served up from the DJC's servers sicne they were available to the public with no protection. Furthermore, they were not classified.
  That is not accurate. The documents were actually on a machine that should have been secure but the system operator had incorrectly applied the ACLs so that the files were visible to Miranda when they should not have been. This 'mistake' did not happen to the GOP files.
  What Miranda did was exactly the same as if he had noticed that the office door of a democrat had not been locked properly and had gone inside to copy the files. That is why he is facing criminal charges.
  Miranda has two options. He can either serve his time in jail or if the facts he claims in his lawsuit are true he can tell the FBI who ordered him to collect the information.
  
  --
  Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
  Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Clarification... by Samrobb · 2004-09-16 07:41 · Score: 5, Informative

Manuel Miranda, the Republican Senate staffer under invesitgation for hacking into confidential Democratic files...
Don't you mean, "under investigation for reading documents posted on an open server?

--
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
1. Re:Clarification... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-16 07:53 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Sure, National Review tells the whole story.
  It wasn't a "open server" it was an unsecured server. Big difference. It's just like using someones unsecured WiFi basestation. You aren't allowed to mess with people's stuff just because it isn't locked. We all learn that as children.
2. Re:Clarification... by BrynM · 2004-09-16 08:16 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Don't you mean, "under investigation for reading documents posted on an open server?
  I see this kind of "they're out to get me" attitude among novice computer users all the time. Somehow, evey problem is "someone hacking". Since most of the users I handle are attorneys, I find myself explaining way too often that the spam they received is not from a rival frim trying to "hack them" or that they're laptop not booting is because they dropped it rather than some clown at the court hacking into the laptop's wireless card when the laptop was in the car outside or other such nonsense. Our paranoid culture is fostering this suspicion on a lot of levels - from media to anti-virus vendors to Presidential decisions. Poor Manuel Miranda is going to get fired and his ass handed to him because people are stupid.
  
  --
  US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
3. Re:Clarification... by dameron · 2004-09-16 09:34 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Don't you mean, "under investigation for reading documents posted on an open server?
  
  Just because I leave my door unlocked doesn't make it ok to steal my shit. He knew he was doing something wrong. They weren't his documents. He shouldn't have been looking at them. He shouldn't have given them to other people.
  
  Just because doing the wrong thing is easy doesn't make it right.
  
  -dameron
  
  ------
  DailyHaiku.com, saying more in 17 syllables than Big Media says all day.
4. Re:Clarification... by Masker · 2004-09-16 10:25 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  OK, no. It's not. Posting documents in a window would be analogous to putting them on a webserver. Having them in an unsecured share drive is like having them sitting on a table in an unlocked room: you still have to enter the room and poke around to see what they say.
  
  It's not OK to go rifling through someone's files. Yes, the Dems shouldn't put documents they care enough about on an unsecured share drive, but that doesn't give anyone the right to copy them for themselves and to distribute them to the press.
  
  Whether the theft was material or not doesn't matter one whit. It was unethical for Miranda to do what he did, and he should take responsibility for that. It was stupid for the Democrats to do what they did, but not unethical, and it's not their fault that some jerk came in and stole documents from their computer.
  
  I'm all for personal responsibility: Miranda needs to be held responsible for his actions.
  
  --
  ---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
5. Re:Clarification... by ibbey · 2004-09-16 13:08 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I'm all for personal responsibility: Miranda needs to be held responsible for his actions.
  
  I absolutely agree with you, but there are two additional points that should be made. As you said, what he did was unethical, but it's important to acknowledge that it may not have actually been illegal. In this case, he should be fired, regardless of whether he is convicted of a crime.
  
  The larger issue, though, is whether his bosses knew & encouraged his taking the documents. If so, they should be held to the same standard. Unfortunately, they won't be, and for good reason (from the politicians point of view): If the dems hold the republicans responsible, then next time there's a similar issue on the dems side, they'll be held to the same standard. By hanging an underling rather then the actual responsible parties, they earn favor for their next transgression.
Some HACKING by Marxist+Hacker+42 · 2004-09-16 07:43 · Score: 5, Insightful

All he did was attach to an OPEN SHARE DRIVE on the Senate LAN. I would have thought this would have been cleared up months ago- Republicans apologize to Democrats, and Democrats start password protecting your share drives!

The whole thing is proof positive to me that we need a new generation in leadership of this country. These old fogies don't even understand the technology that is on their desks- how can they ever hope to understand such complex issues as why we shouldn't be letting Taiwan build all of our hardware?

--
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Politics 101, anybody? by dacarr · 2004-09-16 08:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

The accused seems to be well versed in the basics of politicking. Let's see how far this goes....

--
This sig no verb.
Re:Huh? by Marxist+Hacker+42 · 2004-09-16 08:10 · Score: 2, Insightful

As long as we can still excel in something, anything, specialization and localization makes sense.

But we don't excel in anything anymore is part of the point. HOWEVER, that's not the main point. The main point is that specialization and localization is a bad engineering design- it provides for a single point of failure.

Why shouldn't Taiwan be building all our hardware?
Why shouldn't Vietnam be making all our shoes?
Why shouldn't India be writing all our software?
Why shouldn't China be making all our clothes?
Why shouldn't Japan be making all our cars?

The REAL reason is because we can't trust their governments to look out for the interests of OUR people, and therefore it's stupid to put all of our eggs into one basket. Nor can we trust these other governments with their own disaster recovery- they've all been proven to be rather bad at that aspect of running an economy in the past. Plus, none of them are using LOCAL resources for their work- we ship natural resources overseas to allow them to ship back finished products. This is a stupid waste of fuel.

It's like having all our crops grown in the midwest, all our movies on the west coast, and all our fishing on the coasts. Take advantage of and leverage local resources, and let others do stuff we can't otherwise afford to do.

It would be if those other countries actually had developed resources. By and large they don't. Do you really think all of the materials in your computer come from Taiwan just because they were turned into chips and plastic enclosures there?

--
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Re:Respecting privacy by Ohreally_factor · 2004-09-16 09:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

I guess were no longer making the distinction between hacker and cracker on slashdot?

I'm not a thief by trade or inclination, but you'd still call me thief (and rightly so), if you left your keys in the ignition of your car and I took it for a spin without your permission.

If I were to point out that it was your own stupidity that was at fault, I'd be merely misdirecting attention from the crime (as some conservative slashdotters do), in hopes of excusing the guilty party.

Bottom line is that Miranda gained unauthorized access to information and stole that information, and he did so at the behest of his superiors. While it seems a stretch to call him a hacker or a cracker because of his lack of skills, it describes what he did, regardless of the challenge it presented.

Since his bosses have elected to hang him out to dry, I can only hope that he is able to implicate them and at the very least, drag them into court to answer some hard questions.

--
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Re:The best advice in situations like these: by Ohreally_factor · 2004-09-16 09:33 · Score: 2, Funny

It's a good thing that David Boies doesn't represent Karl Rove in intellectual property matters, or you'd soon be receiving a letter.

--
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Some Ethics. by abb3w · 2004-09-16 11:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

All he did was attach to an OPEN SHARE DRIVE on the Senate LAN.
...containing files that no person had authorized him to access, and which as a lawyer he was ethically obligated to NOT examine, but rather report the appropriate authorities-- to wit, the opposition.
Were the Democrats mindbogglingly stupid? Yes. Should the Democratic sysadmin be summarily fired? Yes-- and probably even fired from a cannon into a brick wall. Was an initial discovery of this open share possibly accidentally? Absolutely. Was this a "hack" doable by the average seven-year old? Very likely.
Was the conduct of the Republicans ethical? In no way, shape, or form. Was it criminal? Possibly; a judge and/or jury needs to sort out the meaning of "authorized" in this context. Computer intrusion law may stretch to cover Mr. Miranda, but not his bosses-- although conspiracy might stretch that far.
Is this the sort of person you want representing you? Speaking for myself: no, to both the idiot Democrats and the unethical Republicans. What the Republicans should have done was made sure the Democrats knew to fix it, and then made sure the press knew that the Democrats had been stupid, and the Republicans had been "gentlemenly" about it and not taken advantage of those poor bumpkins.

--
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
On government-owned computers... by PatHMV · 2004-09-16 11:17 · Score: 3, Informative
These files were on government-owned, taxpayer-funded computers. Were it not for the fact that Congress exempted itself from the Freedom of Information Act, these records would be suject to public review and inspection. Those memos discovered by Miranda which have been publicly released show:
- clear efforts by parties to litigation to influence the results of that litigation by controlling when new judges were confirmed (p. 3)
- confirmation hearings be scheduled around concerns over how a particular confirmation might affect an election in a particular state (South Carolina - p. 8-9)
- racial motivations (to develop a strategy for "dealing with conservative Latino Circuit Court nominees" (p. 14)
- and exactly how much Democrat Senators are focused on pleasing particular special interest organizations and constituencies
So why shouldn't these memos have been in the public eye to begin with? If a whistle-blower had released documents from the White House showing the White House consulting with religious leaders or business leaders or pro-life organizations to discuss judicial appointments and how they would be handled, would anybody be asking for the whistle-blower to be prosecuted? No. The same people on the left who want to crucify Miranda here would be screaming about the public's right to know.

And FYI, here is Miranda's attorneys very clear explanation of the law. Anybody on /. who wants to prosecute Miranda for what he did better be really, really careful about what computers he accesses without really explicit permission in the future.
1. Re:On government-owned computers... by PatHMV · 2004-09-16 14:23 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott would disagree with you. He believes that it's more important to blow the whistle on alleged wrong-doing than to follow the law. He is the Congressman who, in 1997, accepted an illegally-made tape recording of a phone call between Newt Gingrich and Rep. John Boehner and distributed it to the news media. Rep. McDermott, who was held liable to Rep. Boehner for damages in a ruling by a judge last month, had this to say about his law breaking:
  McDermott defended his conduct. "I believed important public issues were involved," he said in a statement, "and that I had the right under the First Amendment to release the taped conversation to the news media."
  Note that McDermott is not the one who made the illegal recording. He merely distributed it to the news media. But distribution of illegal wiretaps is itself illegal.
Re:It isn't every day ... by crmartin · 2004-09-16 13:04 · Score: 2, Insightful

Then you weren't paying attention to your own headline or something, because Ashcroft isn't Miranda's boss, and the Senators who Miranda accuses of pressuring Ashcroft were on the other side, and therefore weren't Miranda's boss either.

Shall I draw you a picture?
(Senate Repub) Miranda's boss <--- Miranda -- sues -> Ashcroft | accuses | v Senate Democrats
Got it? Miranda's not accusing his boss, and he's not suing his boss.

Putz.