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Canadian Arrested Over Plans to Test G20 Security
epiphani writes "Byron Sonne, of Toronto, was arrested today by a task force of around 50 police officers associated with the G20 summit taking place this week. An independent contractor, IT security specialist and private investigator, he had notable ties to the Toronto technology and security communities. According to friends and associates, he had been purchasing goods online and speaking with security groups about building devices to collect unencrypted police broadcasts and relay them through Twitter, as well as other activities designed to test the security of the G20 summit. By all accounts, it would appear that Mr. Sonne had no actual malicious intent. In Canada, the summit has been garnering significant press for the cost and invasive nature of the security measures taken." "By all accounts" may not be quite right; the charges against Sonne, exaggerated or not, involve weapons, explosives, and intimidation.
Here in Canada that translates to a rusty fork, vinegar and baking soda, and not saying 'please'.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
It's been awhile since I got my Canadian Ham license, but I seem to remember learning that it was illegal to rebroadcast, (or talk about, publish, whatever) anything that you heard on the airwaves. I.e. cop, fire, air control, taxi, etc chatter.
Innocent or malicious, the guy was an idiot. How would he ensure nobody with malicious intent took advantage of what he did?
I'm glad this prick was arrested.
It doesn't matter if he had malicious intent or not. The police had no way of knowing for sure what his real goals were. He appeared to be gearing up to do something naughty, and they caught on and stopped him.
All they knew was that some lone wolf out there not associated with the government was trying to crack through G20 security, for *whatever* reason.
Oblig. car analogy: If I was arrested trying to break into someone's car, would the police let me go if I told them I was just moving it so the nice chap who owns it doesn't get towed for parking in a fire lane?
Listening to unencrypted public safety comms won't get you busted (in most places) but:
"Friends say Sonne had talked about sending messages with trigger words or buying up fertilizer during the summit to test security measures."
What a stupid thing to do but they got wind of it didn't they? I'd say he has his answer - security, at least the intelligence component of it, is pretty decent.
I heard about this guy on the news yesterday.
While I don't know the details on what all is is alleged to have done -- he did set a goal to deliberately try to see if they would detect his behavior. He was planning on sending emails with words that would get him flagged by any hypothetical electronic searches they were running, and generally trying to look suspicious to see if they've noticed him. All in the name of seeing what kind of security they had in place, and how well it works.
He may well be completely innocent, a crack-pot, or just some misguided hacker who thinks it's his job to "take on the man". But, it's kind of like trying to get the bull to chase you -- you might not like it when he does. I'm pretty sure they've made trying to identify/breach their security procedures illegal.
The geek and hacker in me applauds such a balsy move. The pragmatist in me thinks he might have tried just a little too hard to get noticed. I mean, antagonizing an already skittish security apparatus ... not the smartest move you can make. :-P
I'm looking to actually hearing more facts as they become available.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No, recording is not illegal either. The law only makes an offence of intercepting communications that were intentionally obfuscated (even if the method was easily broken.)
Also, not updating his facebook with a better, less sullen and crazy looking photo. Before I ever do something like that, I'm going to get a photo of me like playing with kittens or something. Let 'em run that on the news. Not "American Gothic minus the Daughter..."
and since I'm a narcissistic American... I will.
That was what I felt too. It's like testing the security of your house by posting an add on craigslist telling people when I'm leaving, and when I'll be back. Not really a good idea, epsecially since every 100th craigslist reader has a brain, and that one guy might be a robber who would bring a pair of cable cutters to drop the phone / power lines.
Even if security WAS good enough, damage still occurs to the house. The "telcom integrity" gets degraded... the cost of repairing that can be high... lastly a bump key,a rock, or a swift kick, and a masked smash and grab is still possible w/or w/o security.
I think doing that to a major summit is not just irresponsible, there is no way someone in his field can claim they couldn't see the consequences, meaning it can only be formulated w/ malicious intenet. There is no good reason to "test" it's security unless you were hired to do so, and still you wouldn't do it this way.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Enough said!
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
It's pretty ridiculous, I know.
"By all accounts" may not be quite right; the charges against Sonne, exaggerated or not, involve weapons, explosives and intimidation.
Can't you be charged with just about anything a police officer deems necessary to bring you into the station, but you aren't guilty of any of them until proven so? I thought that's how it worked but clearly I'm mistaken.
Though, I mean, the question of Malicious intent does bring up some good points. If I fire a weapon to shoot an Apple off someones head and I miss and end up murdering them, despite how un-malicious my intent is, do I still have to pay for the crime?
Hello sir/madame, are the owner of this establishment?
I must say this is a fine operation you run here. However, I believe your security seems to be lacking. What's to stop an armed man, such as myself carrying these concealed sidearms, from wreaking havoc on your customers and property? Hacking your wi-fi to access and broadcast transaction data to twitter was also a cake walk. Did you honestly think I couldn't get past such simple passwords? Also, I think you could of easily prevented me from rigging your exits with explosives, made from cheap fertilizer I bought and are set to blow should anyone try to escape.
Therefore, I would like to offer you my security consulting services. I think my demonstration speaks for itself but here are some references.
Need to use the phone? Oh I guess its just to call my references.
That's strange, I don't think any of them had numbers that start with 911...
*Scene*
Test passed, I guess.
http://www.torontolife.com/daily/informer/summit-survivor/2010/05/26/833-million-security-bill-for-g20-and-g8-called-insane/
http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandgta/2009/12/17/12184191-sun.html
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/06/11/summit-traffic.html
So, Toronto police gets $12,000 bonus per each 6000 staff for 3 days work - works out to $170/h if they work 72h shift (not possible), $350/h for 12h shifts.
Where is the remaining $800 million? Who knows?
"There are 5,567 officers and 2,056 civilian employees. Salaries and premium pay total $848 million. "
Works out to $111,242 per person for *3 day* meeting... I'd love to get paid $1500-$3000/h from your tax dollars too!
Did he have an agreement with the G20 meeting organizers to test their security? You don't get to "test" people's security against their will.
"By all accounts" may not be quite right; the charges against Sonne, exaggerated or not, involve weapons, explosives and intimidation.
Can't you be charged with just about anything a police officer deems necessary to bring you into the station, but you aren't guilty of any of them until proven so? I thought that's how it worked but clearly I'm mistaken.
No, it doesn't work like that. That only applies to sentencing someone of a crime. But someone says "By all accounts, he is a saint!" you can say "Not by all accounts, as some claim that he has committed a crime" even if he hasn't been proven guilty yet. It's actually quite a simple concept to grasp.
Though, I mean, the question of Malicious intent does bring up some good points. If I fire a weapon to shoot an Apple off someones head and I miss and end up murdering them, despite how un-malicious my intent is, do I still have to pay for the crime?
Depends. You don't have to pay for murder. Now, you might have committed other crime (such as gross negligence or the like) and need to pay for that. It is kinda like with drunken driving: The act of knowingly risking the lives of others due to selfish reasons is in itself crime.
That would be manslaughter.
I don't know about Canada, but in the US, just making stuff up so you can be hauled in can get the police charged with False Arrest.
Can or will? There's a little bit of a difference there...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Googling his name and filtering out (as best I can) the plethora of reprints of this article, it looks like the "explosives" were deliberate acquisition of ingredients to see what it would take to provoke a response. I guess he found out.
As far as "weapons" was concerned, I don't know enough about Canadian law -- what is and is not classed as a "weapon" -- to speculate. But his linkedin says he's a licensed private investigator, and in many areas where it's otherwise impossible, a valid PI license sometimes allows a person to carry concealed. So, he could have legally owned a firearm.
I suspect that to a certain extent this is another example of the "kitchen sink" approach to high-profile arrests, and some of these charges will be dropped in plea negotiations.
Or, I dunno, he could really be a nut. But I don't think so. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
He acts suspicious and gets caught, just as he did.
He convinces the police it was just a "test". They laugh and go away.
He continues and security ignores him as he is just "testing".
He does commit a terrorist attack which get through because the police were ignoring him since that was his objective in the first place.
Would you want to be the head of security to try to explain this?
So he wanted to test security and was caught. Sounds like his test worked great. He should be very please with himself. When he gets out he should test US government security by pulling a gun during on the POTUS during a speech.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
In Texas, you can carry rifles while you protest outside a Republican state convention where Laura Bush is speaking and no one questions you.
Interesting contrast.
Here are a couple of links.
This guy had a theory, that a person acting very suspiciously may not be noticed by government intelligence agencies in a timely manner during an international gathering of heads.
To test his theory, he began taking suspicious actions in an attempt to get noticed. One would assume that the longer his suspicious acts went unnoticed, the more suspicious acts he partook in.
Eventually, his actions were noticed and he was detained.
The conclusion of his test will be in the summary of what suspicious actions he managed to take BEFORE he was detained.
It sure seems like the goal all along was to get caught. The question was to determine the amount of suspicious actions he could take prior to being caught.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Ever since the APEC summit in Australia, police have been extra careful about Canadians trying to sneak in: The Chaser APEC pranks.
How about 50 people to arrest one person because of it. I figured one RCMP dealing with an upset Mule would be enough.
IT HAD BETTER BE THE BEST FUCKING SECURITY EVER.
Over a billion dollars. A billion fucking dollars. Canadian. Citizen's. Dollars. (Our exchange rate is about par.) That's .1% of our GDP and .25% of our national debt. Think about that.
It's a four-day event. That's $300 Million a day, or 12.5 Million an hour, or 208 thousand dollars a minute. (3.5 thousand PER SECOND.)
I'm all for making sure that we've got a secure event, but for that they could have bought an Aircraft Carrier and parked it in the middle of Lake Superior and had an impenetrable fortress. Okay, so some of the G20 don't like the cramped quarters on a military vessel. They could have rented a cruise ship and hauled in, let's say Halifax and VDQ (Canadian Patrol Frigates, our ships-of-the-line) for security. (Or Montreal if they wanted to show off the new Cyclones) If someone else (like POTUS) wanted more security, they could task a Nimitz to accompany the group for the duration. The same with anyone else -- you want more security, bring in a warship.
No "Conservative" ever gets to talk about adscam ever again. EVER. FUCKING. AGAIN.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Many hackers seem to have this ethos of "If I CAN do it then it is ok for me to do." If they can break in to a system, it is ok for them to do in their mind. They figure the person who owns it should have secured it better. Something tells me they would not be nearly so amused if I applied the same thing to their house. "Oh hey! Ya I've been sleeping on your couch watching TV. Well it was really your problem after all, your lock wasn't very good, I picked it easily and your alarm was defeated by just cutting the power and battery cable in it. Don't get made at ME, if you don't want me here YOU should have secured your house better!"
I think hacker types need to remember basic kindergarten etiquette: Don't touch what isn't your without asking first. If you want to learn how to break in to computers that is wonderful, but do it on your own. Don't go and try to get in to other's stuff.
Same shit here.
An event like this involves more than three days in execution. There are months of planning involved. That costs money. Resources are tied up in advance of the event. That costs money. I would like to see an itemized accounting for this event.
Thanks, you basically summed up my feelings on the matter.
The only reason this guy has gotten arrested is because he saw this insanity and wondered "how effective is it really" and proceeded to tell everyone he knew (and a whole bunch of people he didn't know) that he planned to test the security of the thing.
.
No "Conservative" ever gets to talk about adscam ever again.
I am so glad I quit being a Conservative years back, when they promised to never ever ever ever tax income trusts. And then they did, about 6 months after the elections, and my eyes were opened, and I said "Oh. All politicians are lying, cheating bastards." So when MP James Moore, a Conservative, decided to deride copyright reformers as "radical extremists" who "don't have any interest in reforming copyright" and have "babyish views" of it, I wasn't surprised any more than when other Conservatives decided to spend a billion dollars on G20 security.
My point is, every single person in office can be expected to be a lying, cheating bastard. So I think you're right; no Tory gets to complain about adscam or Liberal waste as the height of calumny. They've treated their term in office like it was a race to outspend and outlie the Liberals, and despite the difficulty of the goal, they've achieved it. By the same token, however, the Liberals, who set the bar for the Tories to pass, don't get to complain about this, either. The Bloc Quebecois, who spend all their time extorting similar volumes of cash from the rest of Canada by threatening to disrupt the ruling party's voter base, don't get to complain about it. No party has any right to complain about other parties' wasteful spending, because every party spends criminally while in power. So if one party's crimes prevent them from complaining about another party's crimes, Parliament Hill would get really quiet.
I think, instead, maybe we ought to object to wasteful government spending no matter what party we object to, belong to, or support. I think we ought to object to wasteful spending because it harms Canadians, and not to score points for our favoured party. So I decry the Conservatives spending $1B, and I decry the Conservatives for implementing the GST in the Mulrouney years, and I decry the Liberals for implementing the NEP that destroyed two provinces' economies for a decade, and I decry the Liberals for adscam. There's plenty of blame to go around and no reason to single out a certain party's sins, or assume the other parties are any better.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
We have officially reached insane levels of polarization in the reporting of this event. Law claims he is basically a terrorist, but claim that he is an independent researcher seeing how well our tax dollars are being spent holds water, and gives the police a very good reason to lie.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Unlike Americans, most Canadians have had some level of military training, and have easy access to explosives and hunting rifles - in point of fact, Canadians have twice as many guns per person than Americans do, they just don't use them to kill people in civilian life.
Thus, it's not that unusual for any Canadian to have both experience and training in these things.
That said, it's more likely CSIS or the RCMP are trying to justify their budgets and just plain hate Canadians legal rights to privacy as enshrined in the Canadian Constitution.
(caveat - I used to be on the other side of riots when I was in the Canadian Army)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Arrested by "a task force of around 50 police officers"?
Can you picture a force of 50 officers coming to arrest one person? The need for "security" has become so overdone since 911 it's beyond ridiculous. 50 officers is not a "task force". It's a fucking ARMY. No bloody wonder that Canada has spent over a BILLION DOLLARS on security for the G20 summit. What an incredible waste.
Of course it happens. Do a simple google search for "false arrest" with your state or province name, and you'll find lawyers who advertise as specialists in this type of case. They wouldn't be offering the services if it wasn't helping to pay their bills.
In the United States at least, the real issue is whether or not the claim of "false arrest" shows a violation of "clearly established law". Law enforcement officials are granted qualified immunity against "false arrest" claims, with the qualifier being that no such violation occurs.
In the link provided above, an example of false arrest is outlined, Sorrell v. McGuigan (4th Cir. 2002). The plaintiff was arrested for possession of a weapon, when the law clearly exempted the type of knife he was carrying. The officer thought the knife constituted a weapon, and so arrested him. Because the knife wasn't considered a weapon under the law, and the man hadn't broken any law, he sued for false arrest, and the officer's qualified immunity was denied, and that denial has been upheld on appeal.
I'm not certain of the details of the law in Canada, but I'm certain that they have false arrest provisions as well, and I've no doubt that a massive suit will be brought against anybody with a hand in the G20 security effort if there's even a shred of hope that the guy's being arrested & held on completely trumped up charges.
"You are free of all charges but marked potentially dangerous to the event. A police officer (a security expert) will accompany you at all times until after the summit, and will report all your moves. Do not avoid said officer nor try to conceal your activity from them. You are welcome to continue testing the security like you did so far, in fact we specifically request you to do so. Of course, if any of your routes appears to have a chance to succeed, we will stop you, but you will suffer no consequences. After all, what good is finding security flaws for if they are not reported to the maintainer and given a chance to be patched? So keep poking at our security, please, just don't keep us in the dark about what you find, and don't be surprised if you trigger some traps and alarms we set up."
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
His whole point is that we could get the desired security for a whole lot less money if we didn't put it smack in the middle of one of the busiest cities in the country.
We could have held it on a military base, or on a cruise ship, or in a 5-star hunting lodge up north. All of those would have been way cheaper.
Heck...they could have *built* a 5-star hunting lodge up north for the event, and then given it to a local community to operate for profit afterwards.
The reason the man was arrested is because, without obtaining proper authority he decided to do the equivalent of make bomb jokes at the goddamn airport. it was there job to find potential threats and they found one, the man painted a target on himself and, because that's what security is supposed to do, they nabbed him. That being said, I think 50+ officers is overdoing it, and the security for the G20 was overkill. The man should face charges of 'mischief' or otherwise, be given a slap on the wrist, and everyone should make a big deal about it. They have to scare off people like him, the ones who want to dick around with security(for good intentions or bad). It causes a huge waste everyone's time and resources.
I still have moderator points, but I haven't found '-1 Wrong and somewhat clueless' or '-1 Too stupid for a troll' option, so I'll just elaborate.
Your statement about the argument being bullshit is bullshit.
Just like in case of BP not spending the necessary money and not securing the Gulf of Mexico properly and now paying tens of billions for it + all that oil in the water, imagine if a representative of any country got hurt or killed, what that would do to the image of the country.
First of all, the accident happened with BP was the first of all due to lack of government regulation, does abbreviation MMS ring any bells? and greedy corporations being greedy and all. BP thing was entirely preventable and should not have happened at all, that's why everyone is pissed at them, and the billions it will pay will probably not cover all the damage anyway.
Sort of like that luge accident during the Vancouver Olympics that was totally avoidable had the organizers put some soft barriers, like nets in front of those metal posts that the poor 20y.o. Georgian dude killed himself against.
Allocating more money on the problem does not mean that the soft barriers would have been installed anyway, there's always multiple things to spend money on.
Should it be a billion or half of that or 2 billion, I don't know, but what is known is that a failure in this sort of thing would cost magnitudes more than this money spent.
The biggest problem here, as the parent pointed out, is that why the hell did the meeting had to take place in Toronto with government pointlessly spending garbles while paralyzing a major city and giving its inhabitance an impression of living in a police state? I'm not even evaluating a cost of failure in security, but it's efficacy and how it would have been much better for everyone if Stephen Harper would feel the need to compensate for the perception of the size of his penis, which now I have reason to assume is a quite a bit below average.
And what's up with that artificial lake?
Anyway even if I agreed with the whole point that these summits are in some way promoting Canada, I don't think being a pointless show-off and then letting taxpayers foot the bill gives the right message.
Hey, aren't you conservative libertarians are supposed to be for limited government and fiscal responsibility?
Actually, your argument is far more spurious. Allow me to poke some holes in it. First, you have not countered any of my claims. You have put forth two unrelated points and hope that an oil spill caused by recklessness and a luge accident caused by poor design somehow justify spending a billion dollars on security.
What is the cost of security for these dignitaries at home? Do they spend $3500 every second (cumulatively, of course) on their security? The fencing is $1500 per metre. (or yard, for the Americans out there.) To put that into perspective, they could have built the fence out of Plasma TVs. However, unlike the Panasonic I've got in my living room, it's going to be dismantled and scrapped once everyone goes home.
Canada doesn't have assassinations, we don't have terrorist acts, and we don't have any justification whatsoever for this much expense.
Who is moving to hurt these dignitaries? What plots exist? What's the intelligence chatter? Is anyone behind anything?
No.
All we have from the CPC's talking heads -- many of whom are actually paid to astroturf and argue online about how AWESOME the CPC is and how great a job our PM is doing -- is "imagine what would happen if someone got hurt".
That's it: "Shut the fuck up and let Harper spend your money the way he sees fit."
That's a little interesting, as our Industry Minister has poured... let's look this up... $50 million into his own riding in order to boost his re-election chances and claimed that rework dozens of kilometers away from the summit was "required work for the summit".
As for Nodar Kumaritashvili, whoever designed the track should have been facing criminal charges or at the very least sanctions from APEG-BC. I'm astonished that it didn't happen.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
How much time in advance did the Canadians have to put this together in, was it enough to build a hotel or whatever? Besides, it is irrelevant what you build if you still have to secure it, and securing a totally new structure from scratch is probably much more difficult than an existing one.
I don't really know what went into the 1 Billion, I am interested to see, but to put a blank statement that the fraud perpetrated by the former government is the same thing as spending a billion or whatever on security for a meeting for a bunch of world-leaders, their stuff, to make it all work... it's not a fair comparison.
Whether there was any money wasted or not on this event (and government always wastes money) does NOT change the fact of the liberals' government behavior.
You can't handle the truth.
Canada doesn't have assassinations,...
Pierre Laporte
we don't have terrorist acts,......
All 329 passengers perished aboard Air India flight 182 would beg to differ.
2 out of the Toronto 18 have been released on bail and is currently in Toronto.
The question that should be asked in the first place - why the hell do 20 people (they're still people, not Cthulhu-sized monstrosities, despite the fact that they're G20 leaders) need to meet in person in a highly publicized event in a middle of a large city just to discuss some matters, no matter how important? I'd bet most of the bill - which doesn't even account for major inconveniences to the locals - is due to that alone.
Just give them a cruise ship with an armed escort, and be done with it already. They don't need these kinds of meetings.
Actually, in those four words you've managed to fail at history, political science, and the Internet.
The political spectrum shows socialism on the left-hand side and fascism on the right. Fascism is not restricted to 1930s-1940s Germany. Rather, it is when the state enforces its will upon your own and individuals get little or no freedom. It's in the first paragraph on Wikipedia, for crying out loud. For example, adding restrictions on abortion, gay marriage, and copyright legislation are all fascist moves. (Yeah, I know, one of these things are not like the others.)
Godwin's law requires a direct comparison of someone or something to Nazi Germany or Hitler. You could, I suppose, also Godwin a discussion by invoking alternate Axis figures, for example Himmler, Mussolini, or by a stretch Hirohito.
Merely stating the fact that a behaviour pattern is fascist is not directly comparing anything to Nazis. There's no comparing the murder of 12 million civilians to the mishandling of citizen dollars. That's ridiculous and it shows a serious lack of political insight on your part. I can only assume that you're deliberately putting on a character, as logical flaws that deep should not exist in nature.
Also, none of the participants in the argument can call "Godwin" as that itself Godwins the thread, which means that either party can simply end the discussion by claiming Godwinning on the part of the other party.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Well, first of all, thanks for being civil, that really helps to get your point across.
Also as one of the people replying in the same thread pointed out, comparing BP disaster and G20 meeting is a false dichotomy, if you don't see it let me spell it out -- one is ecological disaster and the other is federal government are just being assholes, if anything G20 meeting reminds me of Mulroney farewell tour.
But since we are talking about BP, your argument is complete bullshit BP is liable, but it's a corporation it has a limited liability, government can sue them only for so much and you can't just jail and shoot people, there's this thing called constitution (both in US and in Canada) that prevents government doing exactly that, there's also pension funds across whole europe that invested in BP and whole lot other reasons; is it enough to say why BP shouldn't just be arbitrary put on a pike?
Also in your fluffy libertarian world with weak (read small) government anyone is supposed to prevent corporations influencing it?
Liberal fraud and G20 meetings are both examples of government waste, I don't really see how you can miss this.
What do you mean by 'play with your moderator points'?
Those examples are from 40 and 25 years ago, and I'd argue that spending this much on security theatre hardly makes anyone that much safer. There's still plenty of unprotected infrastructure and crowded public places out there waiting to be 'terrorized'. Maybe the spending could be considered justified since it'll likely ensure that important world leaders survive, but the reality of terrorism is that you don't have to deal the assassination-blow to the highest value targets to be effective.
Imagine how bad it would look if, despite spending this much, the leaders, safe in their well-secured citadel, looked out to see a bomb go off on the other side of the city. Tragic deaths aside, it'd be a public relations (and likely diplomatic) disaster for the hosts. The very nature of terrorism allows the terrorist to get attention and grief their enemies regardless of the level of security measures applied. It's not possible to lock down the entire universe. If one place is well defended, attack somewhere else. Guerilla warfare 101.
8 years... The location of the G8 rotates among the members.
It's G8 followed by G20 in the same country.
You can't handle the truth.
It's as patently absurd an excuse as those people who justify looking at child porn by claiming to be "hunting it down to report to the police" (incidentally, I never hear in those cases that the people arrested have previously reported X incidents of offending material that they've found in the past, they're always incredibly unfortunate to be discovered on their first attempt). If you're planning on helping out the police, the first thing you should do is speak to the police. The chances are they will tell you that they have everything under control and thanks, but they don't need your assistance.
If you really think there are big holes in the security, report it to their superiors or contact someone in the government about your concerns. If they agree and if they think your insight is worthwhile, they might even hire you as an official security consultant to test their security. The fact is, most people who claim they're only testing security are either Walter Mitty characters living out some deluded fantasy, or else they're people with bad intentions seeking to cover them up with a shield of ineptitude.
I know we tend to want to support the plucky underdog, and some guy "testing the security" of a political event such as this is awfully similar to the plucky hacker "testing the defences" of the Military's computers, but really, even if you have the very best of intentions, if you put yourself in a situation where you mirror the actions of the "bad" guys without the explicit consent of the "good" guys, don't be surprised when the "good" guys treat you like a "bad" guy. As you said, he'll get his day in court to argue his point (but the courts tend to frown on vigilantes just as much as the police), but really if his actions were merely to test security and he did so fully aware of and ready to accept the risks inherent, he should be happy he got caught and happy to take whatever punishment is meted out (as this both proves that security is better than expected and acts as a deterrent).
and costs of 'cleaning up' disasters are much higher than costs of preventing them.
And your point being?
If a government wants to, has a political will and the correct structure (read: is not neck deep in taking 'contributions' and generally relying on the corporations for the (re)elections) then nothing at all can stop a government from suing.
Most electoral campaigns in Canada are publicly funded -- http://www.mapleleafweb.com/features/federal-campaign-finance-laws-canada
Here's also a nice table from that website:
Public Support as Portion of Total Funding by Political Party (2007)
Bloc Québécois 86%
Green Party of Canada 65%
Liberal Party of Canada 63%
New Democratic Party of Canada 57%
Conservative Party of Canada 37%
Also your second to last paragraph is mostly an incomprehensible rant, try turning off the TV and learn how to paraphrase.
And fuck you too.