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Adult Website Use At Work Leads To Hacker Conviction
safesorry notes that several sources are talking about a recent tale of woe about Richard Wolf, a lonely guy looking for love in all the wrong places. Wolf used his work computer to visit the Adult Friend Finder website and upload personal nudes to prospective "friends." Now he's been convicted under a "hacker" law targeted at employees who steal data or access information they shouldn't. "Richard Wolf acknowledged that his behavior was inappropriate when he used his work computer to upload nude photos of himself to an adult web site and view other photos on porn sites, but he didn't think he should be convicted of hacking for doing so."
He added that the city had never actually disseminated a policy regarding internet usage to tell workers what was inappropriate.
"They had crafted one but they hadn't published it," he said. "So there was in effect no policy and no protections on the computer -- no password protection or filtering of any kind -- so basically anybody could access anything on the internet through the city's computer."
And the statue he was convicted under:
"No person, in any manner and by any means, including, but not limited to, computer hacking, shall knowingly gain access to, attempt to gain access to, or cause access to be gained to any computer, . . . without the consent of, or beyond the scope of the express or implied consent of, the owner of the computer, . . . or other person authorized to give consent."
Righto.
FTFA: David Carto, the attorney who handled Wolf's appeal, told Threat Level that Wolf was prosecuted because authorities disapproved of the material he viewed online.
"The reason he was prosecuted was clearly because of the content of what he was looking at," he said. "If somebody else had been on an internet site studying horticulture, I don't think he would have been prosecuted. It was not obscene. It was just something that was not approved of by certain elements of the city government and by the court in which he was tried. The prosecutor and the judge both treated this basically as a sex offense."
So I read this that the judge and prosecution couldn't find an adequate sex offense charge, apart from consulting a dominatrix which is a misdemeanor, so they hit him with the best they could which happened to be the poorly worded anti-hacking law.
If I was witty I'd put something funny here but, as it stands, I am not and have just wasted seconds of your life
The problem wasn't that he was fired, it was that he was charged with a hacking felony for something that wasn't related to hacking.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The idea that if someone does something you don't like, they have to be punished, even if you can't find a law that exactly names the thing you didn't like as a crime, is moronic.
I'll take that a step further: It's evil. Using the law as a bludgeon and a personal retribution device instead of as a scalpel to rid society of true cancers is simply evil.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007