Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

EBay Hacker's Conviction Upheld

Posted by Zonk on from the watch-your-back-out-there dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in the case of Jerome Heckenkamp, the former University of Wisconsin student convicted of federal computer crime charges in 2004 after hacking into Qualcomm, Cygnus Solutions and other companies, and defacing eBay. Heckenkamp was caught after a system administrator at the university hacked into his Linux box to gather evidence that Heckenkamp had been attacking the college mail server. The court ruled today that such counter-hacks are allowable under the 'special needs' exception to the Fourth Amendment, and upheld the warrantless search."

4 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Time element by mangu · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    FTFA: "It's unclear why it took Savoy 15 minutes of poking around to determine the 117 computer and the 120 computer were the same -- since he used the password for the former to crack the latter."


    It's pretty clear to me. The sysadmin (Savoy) suffers from premature ejaculation and 15 minutes of pr0n is all he could stand before going to the bathroom to, well, I suppose he needed to wash his hands...


    Now, about these computers having the same password, it doesn't mean they are the same machine, unless the password is secure. TFA doesn't explain which technique was used to crack the password, so one must assume it was an insecure password. Therefore it's not unreasonable to assume the possibility of two different machines having the same password.

  2. Too Bad... by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Too bad it was the 9th Circuit that upheld this. They are by far the most overturned of all Courts of Appeal.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  3. Re:Told you So... by Rosonowski · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    So you advocate violent anal rape because he broke into a couple of computers. I don't care what you think of him doing that, you're just sick.

    --
    01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
  4. Re:Correct decision by roystgnr · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    The University was not acting as law enforcement, as an agent of law enforcement, or at the behest of law enforcement, and thus is expressly and explicitly not covered by, or even related to, the Fourth Amendment.

    Will law enforcement now be prosecuting the University's system administrator for the crime he committed, or will law enforcment be giving him a free pass? In the latter case, I would certainly hope to see the Fourth Amendment involved.

    Otherwise that would be a nice loophole in the Bill of Rights, wouldn't it? "We don't have a warrant for the police to search your house, but who cares? We can just promise that anyone else can get away with trespass or breaking and entering when they search your house. Vigilantes work cheaper than cops anyway."