Three Arrested For Conspiring To Violate the DMCA

jtcm writes "Three men have been charged with conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after federal investigators found that they allegedly offered a cracker more than $250,000 to assist with breaking Dish Network's satellite TV encryption scheme: '[Jung] Kwak had two co-conspirators secure the services of a cracker and allegedly reimbursed the unidentified person about $8,500 to buy a specialized and expensive microscope used for reverse engineering smart cards. He also allegedly offered the cracker more than $250,000 if he successfully secured a Nagra card's EPROM (eraseable programmable read-only memory), the guts of the chip that is needed to reverse-engineer Dish Network's encryption.' Kwak owns a company known as Viewtech, which imports and sells Viewsat satellite receiver boxes. Dish Network's latest encryption scheme, dubbed Nagra 3, has not yet been cracked by satellite TV pirates."

Comments

Re:Wait

[TheCodeFoundry]

Since when is Gitmo closed? Post-election and post-promises, President Obama has decided that the "hair on fire" issues at Gitmo aren't that bad and has decided to leave it open....exactly what President Bush and Senator McCain were both arguing for. Interesting that Obama supporters aren't up in arms over this, since they were the ones who gnashed their teeth that it was a human rights fiasco down there.

Re:CONSPIRACY to violate a law?

[megamerican]

It is there because it is much easier to convict someone on charges of conspiracy to commit a crime than actually committing a crime. It is also much easier to convict people you purposefully set up.

In a truly free society it wouldn't make any sense but it makes perfect sense in today's world.