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Felony For Refreshing a Web Page?
therandomw writes "An 18 year-old boy was recently arrested in Ohio for telling fellow students to refresh the schools web page in order to slow down the server. He is being charged with a felony and is currently being held in jail. According to Canton City Prosecutor Frank Forchione 'This new technology has created a whole wave of crimes, and we're just trying to find ways to solve them.'"
AFAIK this barely even brushes up against being a felony, but let the school officials have their fun! Had they just ignored this and let it go (maybe take the kid aside and dress him down a bit), this would have slipped off the radar in half a day. As it is, they've loaded, locked, and are about to fire, aiming right at their own feet.
BTW, I'm just wondering who the first brave soul in slashdot is who will actually post the schools URL. (Also, BTW, it's pretty easily found in Google: Lake High School Uniontown Ohio, duh).
This school must have a pretty bad webserver if simply clicking on refresh brings the server to its knees. I mean, it's not like they were generating millions of hits.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Sounds like a distributed denial of service attack. He just left out the automation.
Logically, the only thing that distinguishes a DoS from the Slashdot Effect is intent. If your intent is to spread awareness of the material that appears on a server, and the server can't handle it, well, that's tough for the server, but that's how the Internet works. If your intent is to take the server down, that's illegal.
Up until now, most deliberate attacks were automated, making it easy to separate overwhelming legit traffic from attacks -- but that's only really as accurate as trying to separate legitimate city traffic from criminals by assuming that anyone on foot is a burglar.
Of course, when you get down to the level of intent, you get to his contention that "Help me crash my school's server" was a joke, and that he wasn't actually trying to get people to follow through. And things get murky.
This problem can be solved through software already -- the school didn't take necessary means to avoid such a simple "DoS" style attack.
... especially for school officials ... it could have done a tremendous amount of damage," said Canton City Prosecutor Frank Fronchione.
Judging by this quote, it sounds like they don't even really have a grasp on what kind of "attack" it was.
"It's a crime and it is important we take this seriously
Causing a tremendous amount of damage? WTF? He's not DDoSing Air Traffic Control. What a total load. This kid should sue these jackasses for libel, false arrest, and harassment.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
This is their webpage.
It's dead, predictably. Once again some morons in authority have demonstrated their complete lack of understanding of internet culture. Anyone with an ounce of knowledge of the way people like us think would have dealt with this as quietly as possible so as not to incur the wrath of the entire world. Instead, they thought they'd be smart and "show what they do about this kind of joke", or whatever it was they said.
They shall pay the price for their lack of vision...
Many human actions are only damaging if done en mass. It is a crime to incite individuals to violence, or to disrupt the peace. While this is surely not a violent crime, instructing individuals to perform a DDoS is an attack, whether performed in cyberspace (via browser refresh or other methods) or in real life (say, inciting a flash mob to take all the paper numbers in a waiting line, and leave).
While I'm not certain felony charges are warranted in this instance, inciting detrimental group behavior is far from a new thing, and should be punished.
Than Slashdot should have been in jail long ago. Isn't that exactly what this website is good for?
It's not "Canton City", it's just Canton. And, after having visited there recently, I can tell you it's a midwest town - NOT a city - where life moves just a bit slower than the rest of the country. You can tell by Mr. Fanchione's comments on the article that the police are "trying to teach this youngin' a lesson!" and think they're just so smart for arresting this kid. I agree with your sentiments about how important this really is in the face of actually dangerous stuff. There were all kinds of buildings in that town that probably need to be condemned because they're a fire and health hazard, but no, the 'authorities' are busy arresting kids smarter than they are.
What's crazy is the legal system allowing this. It favors those with deep pockets to bully and force their will upon others since just the hint of legal action is enough to deter most in USA. RIAA actions are public examples of this type of behavior, along with US style patent practices/laws.
This doesn't make any sense, at all.
- If a boy tells his friend to reload a webpage, he gets thrown into jail and gets felony charges.
- A lone spammer gets $11 billion in fines.
- If joe sixpack downloads a movie he gets huge fines.
Yet, if a medium to large corporation sell/delete customer records, infect consumers computers with spyware or the like, they only get a slap on the wrist?
When did corporations get more freedoms than individuals?
He arranged a Denial of Service attack. Think of his "fellow students" as zombies and him as a script kiddie, then pretend you're the admin or legit user of this site. Now tell me you wouldn't be a wee bit perturbed. This is akin to willfull destruction of property and saying he's only guilt of refreshing a browser is like saying a car thief is only guilt of moving your car.
A felony is a bit harsh though. Perhaps there were significant damages involved. Or the cops are out of control.
Wow. They even give you his street address, in case you wanna walk up and punch him in the face. He's no longer safe from the school bullies! ...Provided he ever gets out of jail.
if i break your arm because i didn't see you standing behind me while i was moving a heavy piece of furniture, then there should be mild repercussions
if i break your arm by taking it, looking dead in your eye, and twisting it as hard as i can, then there should be severe repercussions
the whole issue is one of intent
intent matters in this world, and any opinion that ignores intent, about this kid, or a whole range of modern problems in this world, is not a useful or valid opinion
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
According to TFA (I forgive you for not reading it.. this is slashdot, after all), they server admins noticed a slowdown and caught on.
/Devil's Advocate
//Are these allowed on slashdot?
FWIW, for everyone lambasting assuming that "connected to" means "linked to," it's possible that the kid's web page loaded the school's in fifteen hundred IFRAMES (and if the school's website is set to no-cache, which is probably likely, this could be trouble), and also that their hit counter only registers unique IP addresses.
Crying fire in a theatre is private property -- the Constitution protects nothing on private property and the theatre owner is responsible for setting the standards of speech.
You don't make any sense.
Under your interpretation of free speech, it would be perfectly fine to cry "fire" in a public place (say, the Capitol building) and you would bear no responsibility for the resulting chaos that ensued, even if people were trampled to death during the panic.
That's ridiculous.
Crying fire in a theatre is private property -- the Constitution protects nothing on private property and the theatre owner is responsible for setting the standards of speech.
... no.
Um
You think murder is legal/constitutional on private property? Or wiretapping? Or cruel and unusual punishment?
Crying fire in a crowded theatre -- as an example of the limits of free expression -- is the same regardless of whether the theatre is privately or publicly owned.
All of that said, getting folks to click "refresh" is about as legal as suggesting that folks grab free brochures from a stand so as to exhaust the supply of brochures, except that printing more brochures and refreshing the stand are both more expensive to do than restarting a server.
Yes, it's a low-tech sort of DDoS attack but it's not automated. He didn't actually do it himself. It involved the willful cooperation of other individuals. That makes it more like a "grassroots movement".
What if he had said, "Send an info request letter to my school, to swamp the mail-room," hmm?? That's the hardcopy version of what he did. Would he get thrown in jail for that?
I can understand that people wouldn't be pleased by this kid inciting a bit of social disruption, but calling it a felony and throwing him in jail is far too extreme.
I wonder if inciting a DDOS will eventually be a crime...
I ate my sig.
There was a time when we made an important distinction between types of crimes. Misdemeanors were "minor crimes" annoyances that can be cleared up easily enough and are a) not worth making permanent and b) best forgotten once the problems is solved. A classic example is littering, or spraypainting something on a park bench. The former is solved by making the littebug pick up their garbage (and mabye some other peoples') and the latter by having the offendor repaint the bench brown. In both cases the offence can be "fixed" and the individual can learn form a simple dressing down. In most juristictions misdemeanors are not even recorded (or didn't used to be) and never ever became part of someone's permanent criminal record (especially a minor). Moreover misdemeanors aren't liable for jail time above and beyond "time served" (in the drunk tank).
Felonies are major or "permanent" crimes such as theft, maim, and murder. They connotate crimes that cannot be simply "cleaned up", crimes that cannot be undone in any meaningful sense and crimes that may signal permanent problems for the individual in question. Felonies attatch much stiffer penalties (for both juveniles and adults) as well as "permanence". In some states felons lose the right to vote permanently. This is politely known as "Civil Disenfranchisement". In Midevil times it was associated with the term "Civil Death". Felons are also forbidden from obtaining some jobs (in government), and have to tell all other employers of their status. They are also often forbidden from obtaining some scholarships and grants. While not all of these attatch automatically to juvenile felons many of them do. Increasing numbers of states are making no distinction between juvenile felonies and adult felonies. Unlike midsdemeanor crimes felons are truly marked for life.
The basic upshot of this is that this kid could be harmed for life for what is, in essence, a nothing crime. He encouraged people to visit a website and thereby caused a server to run slow, not stop, not crash, not burst into flames, just run slow. This is a temporary problem, a fixable problem, and one that doesn't even require two coats of paint.
This is a dangerous, vicious overreaction on the part of the city prosecutor, and the school officials. They are abusing their power and risk punishing a kid for life for something that should be handled by a stern talking to and no dessert.
Some ex convicts carry around a felony conviction that prevents them from re-entering society or impairs them in some way thus encouraging a return to crime. How much worse is that when the conviction is for something less-damaging than littering.
On another note, I wonder when the prosecutor's up for reelection?
Under your interpretation of free speech, it would be perfectly fine to cry "fire" in a public place (say, the Capitol building) and you would bear no responsibility for the resulting chaos that ensued, even if people were trampled to death during the panic.
Congress shall make NO LAW... who doesn't make any sense?
If I scream fire in the Capitol building, and you trample another -- you committed the violent act. If I hear someone yell fire, I look, I smell, I consider.
Oh, when I was younger my parents' house did burn down while I was in the house -- and I left calmly while still telling my mother-in-law that the house was on fire. My brother and his friend also ran out calmly.
The one who does the trampling should be found guilty of murder, especially if they ran with no obvious signs of fire.
Crime is often determined by intent. Refreshing a webpage is not a crime. Refreshing a webpage with the intent of taking it down is a Denial Of Service attack. Granted IANAL but intent is pretty significant (though not as significant as the quality of your lawyer. Or the size of your pocketbook.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
HA! An overloaded server is damage? Tremendous?
I think this guy is trying to turn an overloaded school website (like anyone visits that anyway) into a mini-9/11.
Tremendous Damage is essentially reserved for 9/11, Oklahoma City, type damage.
IMHO that's borderline slander since it's extremely unlike for any true damage, forget about "Tremendous".
Those are just words to get in the paper, at the expense of someone else's reputation.
If I were that kids parents, I'd consider a lawsuit. Then again, nobody ever wins a lawsuit against a prosecutor.
In the 60s, when I was growing up, only real bad offenses were deemed felonies. Murder, Rape, Arson, Armed Robbery and other stuff like that. Then along comes a new breed of careerist prosecutors and grandstanding politicians, all one-uping each other to see who could be toughest on crime. They're ratcheted damn near everything up to felony status. Are there any misdimeanors anymore?
In my state and others, many drug offenses carry longer mandatory minimum sentences than violent crimes. I was buying ammo recently at a gun shop. There was a sticker beside the register which warned of a 10 year sentence for buying a firearm for someone who shouldn't have one. Well, there ought to be a serious penalty for that but Armed Bank Robbery carries a 7 year penalty. Either the illegal gun purchase should carry a shorter penalty or the violent robbery should carry more. It's nuts.
These officials who slapped the HS kid with a felony say they're doing it to send a message. This is zero tolerance run amuk. All this felonizing of picayune offenses reminds me of something Deep Purple Ian Gilliam joked about on the Made In Japan album, "Make everything louder than everthing else."
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Since when do harmless pranks get you sent to jail?!
And yes it was a harmless prank, the server didn't even come down. And even if it had it would have come back up at what, the end of the class period?
I can remember getting in trouble for making various projectile devices ranging from spitwads to a pen crossbow (that would put a chopstick into a wall....ok that was kinda dangerous) and I never got freaking arrested.
Schools are ridiculous these days. Let kids be kids.
Question everything
If they can demonstrate material damages, yes, for sure, even with out cyber laws. Encouraging any unusual and unnatural behavior which causes material damage is a felony.
If they are on restricted bandwidth, and you encourage people in an unnatural action which causes them to exceed this bandwidth and so incur extra charges, you're responsible for those charges.
Unnatural doesn't mean posting a link. Unnatural *does* mean encouraging people to repeatedly reload the link with the specific intention of taking down the server, as this kid did.
It's not illegal for me to walk into a store. It's not illegal for me to encourage other people to walk into a store. It *is* illegal for me to encourage a thousand people to walk into a store and jump up and down until the floor collapses.
Although this oppinion won't be popular here on the 'dot, the kid effectively incited people to vandalism of some nature, whether in his area this is a misdemeanor or a felony depends a lot on his local laws. Depending on how much damage (eg, man hours to bring the server back up plus bandwidth overage charges) he caused it's definately a felony. If he knowingly spoke to people outside his own state and encouraged them as well, then perhaps it counts as having crossed state borders, and then it's a federal crime.
Let's not delude ourselves, according to the article his objective was vandalism; he deserves a visit from the cops for that.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
"Michael said it was a joke," Forchione said. "We showed him how we deal with this kind of joke."
Being 18, they showed him, indeed, considering he will have a felony in the database tracking him for the rest of his life. In lieu of a job, I guess he can get a book from Loompanics on how to cook meth and be a drug dealer.
But I suppose they had to balance the ethical issues to reach a wise decision. I mean, it's hard to imagine the horror of school web sites crashing around the country. That would send a signal that we're weak on terra.
The more the idea takes hold in my mind, the easier it is to see examples of what cowardly bullies Americans are. Yup, the Canton police really showed this kid what happens when you mess with the school web site. "Take that computer-using high school kid!"
Maybe Kevin Mitnick can get him gigs speaking at the high school circuit?
People modded you as funny, but if you read the actual law, then yes, pushing all the buttons in an elevator could, in fact, be a felony:
... electronic device or system ... so as to disrupt, interrupt, or impair the functions of any ... commercial ... operations.
SB 146, Sec 2909.04:
(B) No person shall knowingly use any
(C) Whoever violates this section is guilty of disrupting public services, a felony of the fourth degree.
(Law snippet borrowed from previous poster...)
That's not really funny at all.
WWJD?
JWRTFM!
It's a high school website. If it got twenty hits in an average day, that's more than I expect; and if any essential school functions were handled by that server, the IT people in charge should be shot.
So, there's the law. How does it apply? The kid used speech to ask others to use a computer to disrupt non-essential functions undertaken by an educational system, but not for an educational purpose. It doesn't.
And since it's a felony, if he does this twice more they'll sentence him to life in prison.
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