EBay Hacker's Conviction Upheld

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."

Comments

Re:Correct decision

[daveschroeder]

Well, the 9th Circuit (which issued this ruling) is a very liberal court, which routinely sides with privacy, individual rights, and personal liberties, and does not err on the side of the state. So you can rest assured that any appropriate protections afforded Heckencamp were more than duly considered.

You may be interested in reading the entire ruling.

The applicable bit:

Once a court determines that the special needs doctrine
applies to a search, it must "assess the constitutionality of the
search by balancing the need to search against the intrusiveness
of the search." Henderson, 305 F.3d at 1059 (citing Ferguson,
532 U.S. at 78). The factors considered are the subject
of the search's privacy interest, the government's interests in
performing the search, and the scope of the intrusion. See id.
at 1059-60.

[...]

The district court did not err in denying the motion to
suppress the evidence obtained through the remote search of
the computer.

[...]

Here, even without the evidence gathered through the
allegedly improper search, there is sufficient information in
the affidavit to establish probable cause. The affidavit recited
evidence that the server intrusion had been tracked "to a campus
dormitory room computer belonging to Jerome T. Heckenkamp";
that "[t]he computer is in Room 107, Noyes House,
Adams Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison"; and
that "Heckenkamp previously had a disciplinary action in the
past for unauthorized computer access to a University of Wisconsin
system." This was sufficient evidence to obtain the
warrant to search "Room 107, Noyes House, Adams Hall."

So, the search warrant exemption applied, and even without the information in question, there was, regardless, already sufficient information for a search warrant.

Re:Correct decision

[daveschroeder]

The reason the 9th Circuit gets overturned is because it's a very liberal court that is often seen as out of step with prevailing views.

It also is very protective of personal and individual rights, liberty, and privacy, and does not err on the side of law enforcement or the state. It is probably statistically the most likely court to rule against the interests of the government and for the interests of the individual.

This one's not going to be overturned.

Also, you should really, really read the ruling.

Re:Correct decision

[daveschroeder]

You forgot the whole part about how even without the allegedly improperly obtained information, there was still sufficient evidence for a search warrant.

Also, at the time that this incident occurred, there wasn't an integrated capability to block MACs on the Housing network by the central IT organization, for various reasons. The most immediately available option was blackholing the IP, which was done, at which point the user simply manually assigned himself an unused IP on the DHCP network and continued malicious activity. The central IT organization does not operate the Housing network, and also didn't have immediate capability to physically disable ports in dorm rooms.

Today, we have all of those capabilities. Then, the only option for dealing with a very critical situation was taking all steps to actively ensure and verify that this computer did not come back on the network during the evolving emergency situation occurring over a very short period of time.

Re:Correct decision

[Ardeaem]

AFAIK, you are wrong, and that is simply spin. A quick google search yielded this: http://mediamatters.org/items/200511090012

During its 2004-05 term, the Supreme Court reversed 84 percent of the cases it chose to hear from appeals of 9th Circuit decisions, compared to a 73 percent average reversal rate for all circuit courts of appeals.* But the high court reversed 100 percent of the decisions it heard from the 1st, 2nd, and 10th Circuit Courts of Appeals.* Moreover, as Media Matters for America has documented, the 9th Circuit's reversal rate was slightly lower than the national average for all circuit courts during the 2003-04 Supreme Court term (76 percent for 9th Circuit vs. 77 percent nationally), and only slightly higher than the national average during the 2002-03 term (75 percent for 9th Circuit vs. 73 percent nationally) and the 2001-02 term (76 percent for 9th Circuit vs. 75 percent nationally). and

While it is true that the Supreme Court has reversed more decisions by the 9th Circuit than by any other circuit court in terms of numbers alone, the 9th Circuit has a far bigger caseload than any other circuit (including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit). People have tried to label them as some kind of crazy pinko judges, always on the wrong side of the Supreme Court, but it isn't true. And even if it WERE, with some of the decisions we've gotten lately you could do much better than always siding with the Supreme Court.

Now that I've read the ruling..

[Kythe]

...I have to modify my comments, above. It appears that the sysadmin wasn't involved in "vigilantism" under the normal definition of the term.