Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is ridiculous.
I think losing your job would be punishment enough in this case.
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Every geek worth his geek-badge has bypassed the company web-filter. According to this law, that's hacking. That whole "theft of services from office" part was overturned but only because they couldn't show his work had actually suffered from his actions.. whereas if all you do at work is post on Slashdot and your work suffers, you could be charged with a crime.
So yeah, basically, if you have an employer who is a big enough dick, most of us are criminals.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Extrapolate that policy to it's finality. A company can decide at any time to change their policy and any use they don't agree with, pornographic or not, becomes a felony.
Watch out /.ers, it's a felony to browese at work now.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Quoted from the appellate court's opinion:
Upon review, we find that the crux of the state's "unauthorized use" case was based on the proposition that Appellant was acting outside the scope of his authorization to use the computer by engaging in criminal conduct, i.e. soliciting prostitution.
This wasn't so much about this guy sending naked pictures of himself as it was about him using his work computer to set up a rendez-vous with a dominatrix. The court determined that this was pretty obviously outside the boundaries of what you might reasonably expect to be able to do with your work computer.
/. at work. Then we'll have an interesting case. :)
That said, it's troubling that a misdemeanor (solicitation) can get double-whammied into a felony because it's done on company time, and that that's apparently at the company's discretion. And the potential for abuse is there. It doesn't look like the guy advanced constitutional vagueness arguments (probably because this isn't a great case for that). Eventually someone will be fired for surfing
This is a joke right? How the hell can the government make that a crime?
May be silly, but its his choice.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The case began when Larry Wise, the Superintendent of the Shelby City Wastewater Treatment Plant, where Wolf was employed, was deleting old files from a work computer and found a nude photograph of Wolf.
and
Initially he was suspended while police investigated the case, but was promoted after he returned to work. He lost his job, however, when he was convicted of the charges.
The important question would be why his employer even phoned the police in the first place. This is one of those bizarre situations where it is obvious that the person was persecuted for a lifestyle choice and not for what he did or didn't do at work. As stated in the article, he would not have been prosecuted if he would have looked at horticultural Web sites [and uploaded pictures of flowers].
Let's let businesses come up with new felonies on the fly! Woo!
It's because of that stupid fucking judge in the whole MyFaceSpaceTubeBook teen suicide case. In that case, the judge ruled that a simple TOS violation was hacking under the way the anti-hacking statues are written.
Hopefully we will see enough of these moronic lawsuits that the courts will throw out the anti-hacking statues and put and end to the current system of selective enforcement.
Basically, right now ANY "unauthorized access or use" of any computer or network is punishable under anti-hacking laws. Of course they only prosecute those they don't like or have a beef with.
It's slightly dumb, but it's only as spectacularly dumb as you suggest if you honestly think he could've reasonably expected to be charged with a crime like this as a result. I think it's obvious that no reasonable person would expect that, and most people aren't aware of such laws either. It's only easy for you to see that because of the context you're reading it in, where you happen to know the harshness of the consequences.
What this law says is that if your company has a policy somewhere in its fine print that you can't access, say, Slashdot from a work computer, and you are caught accessing Slashdot, you can be charged with hacking as a crime. Does that really seem reasonable to you? I don't think so, I don't think any sane person thinks you'd be that much of a dumbass just for reading Slashdot on a work computer, but that is *exactly* what this law allows.
Obviously a law like this could be abused by a boss who just doesn't like you, or wants to extort anything from you in any other way (e.g. prevent you from leaving).
No, it's because the wife and kids are at home. Mr Bigshot likely isn't the big-shot at home.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Lawyers (that includes Judges) can do anything they want to you and get away with it. They have erected a multitude of laws and offenses. You are going to be guilty of at least one even if they have to stretch it like they have here. One more reason the break their Guild.
This is a classic example of an overly-broadly-worded law that is now being used to prosecute people to whom the law was never intended to apply.
WHENEVER your Congresscritters -- or eve City Council -- want to pass a law that is too broadly worded, oppose it. I did once, and was told "It will never be enforced that way." My reply was, "If it is not intended to be enforced that way, why was it written that way?"
When you give the government power to do something, eventually it will... even if that was not your intent. So make sure the intent is clear, and just do not give them powers that you do not intend them to use.
Isn't any different, and i don't see any jail time associated with that sort of act.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
DMCA uses the same trick. Circumvention (a thing you're never allowed to do) is defined as bypassing blah blah blah "without authorization."
Which sort of almost makes sense, except that the body that makes this law, isn't the party that grants/denies authorization, nor sets up a regulatory agency to do so. It's a third party, a private party. Who decides if you may or may not bypass a technological measure that limits access? Who decides when you can upload a nude picture of yourself? Not the government, not the people's elected representatives; they haven't prohibited or allowed either activity. Someone else decides.
BTW, the decision of granting/denying authorization need not ever even be communicated. It's bad enough that reading the legislation and case law won't tell you whether an act is illegal; the party who decides whether it's illegal or not, need not even tell you. In this particular case (uploading nudie pics to a hookup site), it seems .. well .. obvious that the user wasn't authorized to use the computer for that (though I guess sometimes "obvious" is in the eye of the beholder), but the end of TFA talks about how the policy was drafted but not distributed -- yet it was still enough for a conviction.
You might think that the safe thing to do, is always assume you don't have authorization to do something, unless you know that you do. Surely that makes sense, right? Nope. Look at any of your DVDs. Does a single one of them say you're allowed to bypass the protection? Every DVD player, even the DVDCCA-licensed ones, bypasses the protection. What you don't know, is whether that's circumvention or not -- whether your act of bypassing the protection was authorized or not. Millions of people have played DVDs. These things are for sale in mainstream brick'n'mortar stores. And if push comes to shove, no one who has ever used one, can prove they didn't break the law. All the copyright holder has to say, is "That wasn't authorized" and the case is open and shut.
Back to computer abuse acts: are you authorized to load example.com's page on someone else's computer? You probably don't know, and common sense might not help you.
When will you find out? When you ask what crime you've just been charged with. By then, it's too late. They came after this guy for uploading nudie pics. Piss them off, and they can get you for loading example.com's web page.
Congress has effectively ceded political power (!!) by letting these third parties, not Congress themselves and not the courts, decide whether a criminal act has occurred.
And we call this "law." Wow.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I couldn't tell from the article whether the guy represented himself, just said, "Yes, I did it," or had a total boob for a lawyer in trial court. The bottom line is that the facts regarding lack of an acceptable use policy should have been presented at trial. Regardless of what he did, if the city hadn't established a policy that personal use of a city computer was forbidden and other people had gotten away with similar actions (e.g., uploading pictures to say FaceBook), his actions were not illegal or inappropriate. It is irrelevant that he uploaded nude photos of himself since there is no AUP that defines what sorts of personal uses are OK and what actions are forbidden.
It sounds like the lawyer handling his appeal has a better grip on this but this should have been disputed at trial. He may still be able to get out of the hacking conviction with the appeal (How can computer use be inappropriate when the city hasn't established what constitutes inappropriate use?) but he should have been fighting this a long time before it ever got to the appeal.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Man, I'm glad that we have Anonymous Coward to explain these letter substitutions for us. The funny thing is that in the two ACs here were probably the same guy.
Your brain is not a computer.
This is disturbingly close to burning people at the stake
Really?
Yet some people are sending hate mail to a person whose picture was linked to the attacker by a newspaper and othe rpeople with similar names are receiving threaths. HELLO! The guy is DEATH! The moment your hate target answers the phone, and he answers, shouldn't that be a major clue that you got the wrong guy?
No matter what you do, even if you forced newspapers to follow-up or print the complete truth for once, you could never eradicate the idiots.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Of which there are none.
Odds are his employer blocks those kind of sites.
Yes simply visiting them would be inappropriate, but not hacking.
However, if you were unable to visit them due to your network security infrastructure, and to do so circumvented your network security then yes, that is hacking.
Likely it was something simple like setting up a proxy at home, and doing it that way. Who knows perhaps he using something a bit more exotic. In this way he would compromise the security of his employers shared network for his own personal use.
There are a lot of websites that get blocked like facebook (thank god not slashdot!), and I have thought about doing this myself. Then again I am not stupid enough to actually do it. I will re-evaluate my decision when and if they decide to block slashdot (which won't happen anyway, as likely the network IT folks like access as well).
Anyway the guy is an idiot to be looking at this sort of thing at work...
The trial court's decision was upheld by the OH intermediate court of appeals. This case screams for an appeal up to the OH Supreme Court. The statute as applied here seems to fit right into the void-for-vagueness doctrine, which the US Supreme Court described as follows:
"Vague laws offend several important values. First, because we assume that man is free to steer between lawful and unlawful conduct, we insist that laws give the person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited, so that he may act accordingly. Vague laws may trap the innocent by not providing fair warnings. Second, if arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement is to be prevented, laws must provide explicit standards for those who apply them. A vague law impermissibly delegates basic policy matters to policemen, judges, and juries for resolution on an ad hoc and subjective basis, with the attendant dangers of arbitrary and discriminatory applications." Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 108 -09 (1972), quoted in Village of Hoffman Estates v. The Flipside, 455 U.S. 489, 498 (1982).
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment14/15.html#f8