Slashdot Mirror
Court Rules Sending Too Many Emails Is "Hacking"
An anonymous reader writes "An appeals court has ruled that having people send a company a lot of emails (in this case, a union protesting a company's business practices) qualifies as hacking under the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act. We're not even talking about a true DDoS action here, but just a bunch of protest emails. Part of the problem is that the company apparently set up their email to only hold a small number of emails in their inbox, and the court seems to think the union should take the blame for stuffing those inboxes."
The "problem" is that hacking and disrupting services is governed by the same laws, without much distinction. And it is disrupting services if the sender knew about or had reason to know about the limitation of the recipient.
What about a company sending a lot of emails to a person?
WTF?
If you can get charged with being one of a thousand emails, the only way to avoid that is being pseudonymous. To put it in a nutshell, shit's about to get fake.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Don't send emails to your representative!
My physical mailbox at home is kind of small and when I go on vacation it can get full to the point of no longer being able to put more mail in. Do I get to go after Capital One or any/all of the other habitual mail spammers now? If not, why? Because this Act only covers electrons flowing through wires and not physical items physically limiting my mailbox?
is hacking!!!
If disrupting services by sending too many emails for a tiny mailbox to handle is hacking, then Slashdot directing too much traffic to an anemic host must be hacking too.
If the company can't handle the consequences of its actions, it shouldn't act.
omg think of all the MBA tools who will now start calling themselves "hackers" b/c they have callouses on their blackberry fingers.......
The problem with this is likely that their computer system was not sound, and should not have caused any real damage.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
Seems like this is the digital equivalent of every bit of Bush Jr.-era legislation rolled into one.
Maybe they could direct their protest emails into a digital free speech cage? (mailbox that stores in /dev/null)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
So if a company does something that causes them to receive complaints the complainer is a hacker, what crap Is that. The blame should be on the company for making a bad decision. I have the freedom to communicate with them as much as I want, especially if they are not addressing my issue. I think the people approving this junk needs to be jailed. So if a company were to release a bad product and consumers were to send lots of emails demanding a fix they would be hackers too? Man I never knew how much I really hacked... let's send emails demanding this get fixed....
People sending emails in response to a public call to action, to express their own views, is "hacking" and "denial of service".
.. that's totally fine and dandy.
Whereas setting up a captive SMTP server in a hosting farm to blast-transmit emails by the millions to people who had the misfortune to have their email addresses added to a spam list
"It's like they're *daring* us to revolt!"
A company is a person by the way...This idea originated in the 19th century.
Now this is gonna call for some new videos on Youtube.
"How to hack someone's e-mail account"
*Sends a couple of e-mails to the person*
Comments: :E"
"This is illegal
"Haha, now he has to change his password, since his e-mail account has been hacked"
IANAL, but where do we draw the line?
Koalas. They're telepathic. Plus, they control the weather. -Margaret
I LOL'd.
It looks to me like there are a couple of judges here that want to receive more emails.
So the slashdot effect would qualify as hacking now? Dang, I must be 1337!
A group of people send a bunch of emails to an email server, bringing it down. Court rules that activity is illegal.
A group of people send a bunch of server requests to a website server, bringing it down.
Ergo, Slashdotting is illegal.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Shutting down companies... One email folder at a time!
When the going gets Fake, the Fake turn pro.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Here's the actual decision. First, the company's request for an injunction to stop the mail campaign, denied by the district court, is still denied. The claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse act goes back to the district court, and can proceed there, but the appellate court makes no comment on the merits of that claim. The appellate court was only dealing with the issue of whether the Norris-LaGuardia act, which gives jurisdiction to the National Labor Relations Board when the behavior involved arises out of a labor dispute, preempted the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act . The appeals court decided that this isn't an NLRB matter, and goes back to the district court.
In Theory...
So if 1 million people manually send an email no more than 100Kbytes in size, that is 100 MBytes.
Seriously? A single email account at a company has less than a 100 MB mailbox (or even free space)?
What if a bunch of people send e-mails to their political representatives and slog the representatives' inboxes? Is that considered hacking? Didn't that just happen after a digital call to arms by Preseident Obama regarding the debt ceiling ordeal?
That kind of gets into a fuzzy grey area about the freedom to contact one's own political representative (i.e. speech).
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I can't find the words hack or hacking in the Court's decision anywhere. Am I missing something?
I'll disagree with what seems to be the consensus here, if they sent emails with the deliberate intent to bring down the mail server. It's a crude hack but it is taking advantage of a flaw in a system to cause damage.
It seems that they carried on emailing without actual malicious intent. However it looks like they were told that this would bring them down. That brings it down to recklessness. Does recklessly damaging a computer system count as hacking?
Now it's very clear that anyone with an internet connection can hack. No real skills needed!
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
The law in question is called the Computer Fraud and Abuse act, and I'd say they're going with the angle of abuse. In this case, LIUNA seems to have been going for what amounts to a DDoS attack against the contractors phones and emails.
To generate a high volume of calls, LIUNA both hired an auto-dialing service and requested its members to call Pulte. It also encouraged its members, through postings on its website, to “fight back” by using LIUNA’s server to send e-mails to specific Pulte executives. Most of the calls and e-mails concerned Pulte’s purported unfair labor practices, though some communications included threats and obscene language.
Now, right or wrong, I can at least see the reasoning of the ruling, and this isn't just a clueless judge saying "Oh noes, they hax0r3d the company interwebs". LIUNA seems to have decided that they were going to use their membership and outside companies to shut down Pulte's communications. That they used individual members instead of a botnet to go after the email server seems irrelevant, the intent was clearly to beat the company into submission, not just to voice dissatisfaction. Had they not hired the guys with the autodialer it would have been much easier to believe they were just trying to make themselves heard.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
I mean seriously, If your company can't handle a couple hundred emails a day, then you have bigger problems to worry about. I work at a very small firm, and I receive up to 150 emails a day for various reasons. This doesn't even come close to stopping me from doing work. Buy a 1.5TB hard drive for 200 bucks, and call it a day. Oh, and for the love of God, learn to use the sort button.
They own you and make the rules. Just accept it. It cant be changed at this point.
If you haven't been watching, the United States of America is 100% DONE AND OVER. Your politicians so obviously hold you in contempt they deliberately tanked the countries credit rating, just for the sake of a dickwaving contest in TV.
The problems cant be fixed. Americans are too weak willed, and weak mined to fix them. Toe the line, sit down, and shut up.
So now any company with union workers can set their inboxes to hold only a few messages, do something the union workers think is un-fair, and charge them with hacking when people start sending angry e-mails? This seems to be a cop-out to a larger problem. On the other hand I guess it could make union workers sit down with their union and think about what is to be said, rather than everybody e-mailing "this sucks"
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Sometimes I have the feeling it was a bad move to allow the general public on the internet. Because they don't get it, and they will keep saying and doing really stupid things that hurt it.
Sending an email over a defined protocol that has a mechanism to handle a full inbox is not hacking. Failing to use basic 802.11 security and then bitching when google or somebody receives them **as the protocol is defined to work** is not hacking on google's part either.
People need to start demonstrating that they have at least a basic understanding of the protocols before being allowed to pass laws about them or interpret existing laws about them. Otherwise, all these things are going to drive us into an utterly insane world of paralysis through sheer idiocy.
Would the same amount of physical mail result in any legal actions against the union?
No? Then the judge is an idiot.
what's next voice mail full = hacking? parking lot full is = hacking as a Computer turns on the full sign?
If we comment too much on this post we might be hacking /.
Did the union send the emails with the full knowledge they would overburden the mail server? In other words, was it "let's hurt their computer, oh and this is a way we can make it look legit?" Union loses: This is a DOS disguised as a speech action.
OR
Did the union send the emails as a protest and the computer problems were just an unfortunate side-effect? Union wins: They had no obligation to determine if the email system was up to the task or not.
OR
Did the union send the emails as a protest with the full knowledge that the email system would not be able to handle it? Union will probably lose under the doctrine of reckless indifference or gross negligence but it won't be nearly as bad as if sabotage was their intent.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
cable systems can use the same stuff on high free VOD use and big time downloaders by saying your use is give a DDoS to others.
Time for tech judges and courts with jury who know about IT or at the very least have to pass some kind of basic test on IT / Computers.
Now this seems a like a judge who is to much on the letter of the law with not known must about IT other then not working / maxed out.
I think certain people ( first post, LOL, etc.) should be charged with hacking. ;)
and anyone using emoticon.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
From the opinion:
This was in-part an automated denial of service. But, okay, give them the benefit of the doubt. They didn't know their campaign was materially inhibiting the company's ability to conduct business, and the law requires they intentionally do so. The union also categorized this campaign as "fighting back." Even though the court didn't, I'd again give them the benefit of the doubt as that being generic rhetoric. But then there's this:
An organization without such intent would have ceased upon learning of the disruption. But they kept it up. The intent to deprive the company of the use of its systems was obviously there.
However, the opinion rejects the claim that the campaign constituted unauthorized access.
It was a DDOS attack:
http://computerfraud.us/articles/can-a-labor-union-be-sued-under-the-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act-for-spamming-an-employer%E2%80%99s-voice-and-email-systems
(1) The union “instructed its members to send thousands of e-mails to three specific Pulte executives; (2) many of these e-mails came from . . . [the union’s] server; (3) . . . [the Union] encouraged its members to “fight back” after Pulte terminated several employees; (4) . . . [the union] used an auto-dialing service to generate a high volume of calls; and (5) some of the messages included threats and obscenity. And although Pulte appears to use an idiosyncratic e-mail system, it is plausible . . . [the union] understood the likely effects of its actions–that sending transmissions at such an incredible volume would slow down Pulte’s computer operations. . . . [The Union’s] rhetoric of “fighting back,” in particular, suggests that such a slow-down was at least one of its objectives.
Id. at *6.
I don't want to be accused of hacking my senator's account. I would have to quit my day job and devote my self to writing emails 18 hours a day to protest everything I feel deserves a protest message, and it now seems that even if I could do this, it would be against the law....
But from the article, it sounds explicitly like this wasn't a "sound" system ... it was badly configured, and couldn't keep up with the load put on it. If a court is upholding this as "hacking" then they're unqualified to evaluate this.
Seems like every time someone tries to pass a law related to technology, the law is written so badly as to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the thing the law is trying to cover.
How could the union possibly know that this would crash the email system?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"The people running them and involved are all being charged with hacking and being sentenced to 5 years in prison." Give me a break, the government should no longer be allowed to make rulings on anything tech related since most judges and elected officials either A) Don't even know how to type or use a computer or B.) Type with two fingers at about 10 words per minute. This is just further prove about how putting a bunch of senior citizens as judges and congressmen is a bad idea. My father is only in his 50s and is fairly tech savvy compared to some of the other people his age, but I still routinely get calls about computer issues or doing something on the computer. If judges or congressman are going to be making laws or judgements on issues relating to technology, they should all had to go through multiple college courses on the subject in order to avoid judgements like this that anyone who knows what email is would think is retarded.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
It is not a "public call to action". It is a Union orchestrating a campaign with the intent of making it impossible for a company to do business until the business complies with the the union's demands. It is a basic DoS attack with the intent of intimidation; do what we want or we will ruin your business.
"Sound Computer"
All mail servers have a limit on the number of emails it can handle. Overload that limit and there can be issues. Thousands of emails a day and phone calls every few minutes can easily reach that limit. The other issue is attempting to sift through the thousands of emails to find the ones from customers. That takes hours and money. By the time one works through the first thousand there is another few thousand waiting.Even if the server is still running that mailbox is unusable.
Spam
The difference between this action and a company sending out millions of emails to millions of people is as follows;
1. The recipient if spam is not denied access to their regular mail due to spam. Most good mail readers sort spam into another folder so the recipient does not see it. Email from thousands of different legitimate addresses can not be sorted in this manner.
2. Spam is illegal in many countries. In the US CAN-SPAM covers commercial emails.
3. The intent of SPAM is not for one organization to put another organization out of business.
Email campaigns to public officials
An email campaign to a public official has the intent of showing support for a position and influence the official toward that position. Without that kind of support an official has no way of knowing how the public feels or thinks about a policy. It is in effect a vote by the constituency and very democratic.
The intent of the union campaign was merely to disrupt normal business and intimidate a company into doing what they want. A business is not a democracy where the workers vote for what the company does. There is a grievance process for this kind of issue that does not include damage, harassment and intimidation.
Physical mailboxes
Yes, physical mailboxes do get stuffed with useless mail. The difference is that the companies that send the junk mail did not get together and target a mailbox with the intent of filling it up with junk so that real mail will be lost. If you leave a physical mailbox unattended for a couple of weeks it will fill up. In the case of the union action, they filled the mailbox in a day. Coordination and intent is the difference.
Good point. But let's go back 100 years to a time before email. If you ran that same story in a NEWSPAPER and 1,000 people sent LETTERS to Congress, would that be an attack on Congress?
Sticking with the 100 years ago scenario ... suppose the Post Office gave those 1,000 letters to Congress to one 60 year old mailman to deliver. And the weight was so much that he fell down and broke a leg.
Are YOU guilty of assault and battery because he broke his leg carrying the letters that your newspaper story led people to write?
I broke into this website and left a comment on their webpage!
This is about plutocracy and anti-labor stance. If the roles were reversed, then the union would be forced to compensate the company for the damages that the union's badly configured server caused the company.
Remember to decrease the size of the mailbox to be able to sue for damages caused by full mailboxes.
Half the time when something makes it on ./ the website crashes.. Can the website now charge ./ with hacking?
Downloaded the PDF, searched. "Hack" does not appear even once.
Can we email the Judge or will we go to jail for hacking?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Not a bot, but they had their own mail server mass-spamming the company.
All they need is for their server to be more powerful than the company's to create a denial of service that would require efforts to mitigate, just as is required for large scale DDOS bot attacks, but on a smaller scale.
Of course it disrupts... it is meant to. So, what now: no loud talking, protestors must have reservations and a seat, letters clogged the mail box? Wow...
Land of the free,home of the brave: open 10a to 1p M-W-F, limited access. Good behavior a must.
So if I severely reduce the size of my USPS box, do you think I have a chance of making all the junk mail stop?
Is it Exchange, is it Lotus, is it Zimbra? Is Pulte emails system hosted? Is it in the cloud? What inbox limit does Pulte enforce? Do they have a SAN back end? are they on JBOD? What does Pulte calculate their per inbox cost is? Why would a company create a system which brought down their system so easily?
My friend works for a major internet provider and his job is cleaning up e-mail issues usually caused by jackasses; sometimes its the programmers where he works; but mostly its groups who decide to they are going "Show someone whats what".
I don't care if its a union or not, slamming someone's mailbox is not a proper method to demonstrate your position. One e-mail from each union member is one thing, organizing outside groups is another. Which brings me to one item I have experience with, when unions want to protest an organization they not only rely on their own they pay for help. That help usually is non-union minimum wage people with no benefits to carry signs and the like. I am quite sure they also pay outside organizations in this day and age for "mailing assistance"
If you follow the articles you will see this union hired an outside company to spam the voice mail boxes of the company. They also asked their members to do the same to the e-mail system. If this is not hostile action then I don't know what is. The company asked the union to put a stop to it and they would not. So what is an "Evil corporation" supposed to do? Just accept it as a cost of doing business? Even if it prevents you from doing business? How big of mailboxes should the have for voice mail or e-mail before it meets some artificial limit?
Really, if someone is acting like an asshole and you ask them to stop then why not take them to court?
PS: If you think unions are all flowers and bunnies you obviously never worked under one or with people under one. BTW, I suppose that the union in Verizon's current case is really trying hard to stop the damage being caused by its members? Far too many of these groups are thugs. They intimidate both workers and businesses all the time. Seeing one gets its balls busted for it is a good thing. We should promote proper and lawful solutions, not intimidation and depriving another of their livelihood.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This was a non-representative union. It doesn't represent any employees of the target company.
Tha'ts a problem these days. A small company doesn't just fight with its union that it has a contract with. If any dispute happens, powerful unions from across the country will come down on them with a huge bankroll. They pay for high-power lawyers, robocall centers, mass emailers and (I love this part) non-union picketers.
They basically have a huge expensive package they can open up at a moment's notice on any company that pisses them off. It's enough to bury most small companies, extort them into complying because they can't afford to respond. This company is big enough to fight.
They even have a package they can enact if a company refuses to immediately cave into all demands for unionization. They move to prevent a worker vote until they've had time to pressure the workers, including threats and harrassment, and sneak enough ringers into the company. Meanwhile, they wage an all-out public relations campaign against the company trying to bankrupt them through lost business and legal fees.
This is an SEIU trademark, even for a company that in the very beginning says "Okay, let's let the workers vote, and we'll gladly accept a union if they want it." They SEIU doesn't like that they'd lose that vote if the workers are currently well-paid and happy, so they try to engineer a situation where they will win.
1) Laws about computers are written by politicians who don't understand them.
2) Laws about computers are interpreted by judges who don't understand them.
3) Lawyers only care about who wins.
The current system is fundamentally broken.
John_Chalisque
facebook is hacking me all the time! With all their silly emails
Uh, What sort pf "volume" of emails are we talking about here?
Mega multiple emails from the one source? Mega multiples from various sources (i.e. Union members) ?
Interesting concept loaded with all sorts of implications
No. They don't. They fired a worker for malfeasance, next thing they know they're getting DDOSed by phone and email.
Sorry for you if see reality as biased. You didn't dare to refute any part of my statement. These days the unions are well-coordinated and well-funded. Most target companies aren't.
Did you know the SEIU once flooded an emergency room with fake patients who weren't sick in order to force a hospital to unionize? The SEIU's abuses, not of just companies but of workers, in particular are well-documented.
My balls are currently in a moist, warm and slightly squeezed state. I can see the bar cross the street. Life is good.
It was extortion. Give in to our demands or disruption of your business will continue. RICO time, union officials in PMITA prison, if we didn't have a DoJ in the pockets of the unions.
I hate unions, and I still support the union here
I see no reason for them to exist, following the passage of the fair labor relations act. The CWA routinely harrased a number of IBM facilities, as if by using networking we were also communications workers, even though we were all salaried engineers and therefore exempt, according to the department of labor.
That said, I see the unions actions in this case as being no different than having a sit-in at a diner at the height of the civil rights movement, or a protest by the UAW blocking entry of workers into a manufacturing facility.
Now THAT said, sit-ins were civil disobedience, specifically in violation of the law, in order to DOS the court system into forcing a change in law (and which were successful in that). However, in accordance with law at the time, many of the protesters involved were in fact arrested, since the only way to try a point of law is to violate it, and then go to court over it to demonstrate why a reasonable person would do the same.
Whether the tactics used in this case constitute legal tactics of protest as a matter of process for collective bargaining, or if they constitute acts of criminal trespass on the effected communications systems really remains to be seen.
Either way, it's an interesting case.
-- Terry
So the courts in the U.S. are now saying:
Money is speech (Citizens United Case)
Speech is not speech (this case).
Does anyone else here have a problem with that?
They would certainly have to show Mens Rhea, (intent). This means the protestors would have to know that their action would break the e-mail system. Hell, making it so that any reasonable number of messages can bring down an entire system sounds like incredibly, incredibly horrible design.
This is deemed hacking by the author of the article. The ruling has nothing to do with hacking. The ruling has to do with abuse which, from the details presented in the filings etc, it most likely is. This has little to do with the fact that it was a union. From the filings, their intent was to disrupt communications, NOT simply to express their thoughts. Anyone that believes this is anti-union or even hacking related should contact me immediately because I have some ocean front property in Arizona that I'm sure you would be interrested in.
When I saw the blurb, I couldn't believe a court could be that stupid. After reading the opinion, not so much. Sorry to get all lawyer-y, but this was the union's motion to have the case dismissed before any evidence could be considered. The court didn't rule that the union violated the anti-hacking law. The court ruled that the union's conduct **as alleged in the company's legal complaint** (just a working assumption -- no evidence yet!) **COULD** constitute a violation, based on the allegation that the union acted as it did KNOWING the effect it would have, and INTENDING it to have that effect. I think that was based in part on the company's allegation that the company informed the union about the effect the email campaign was having, and the union continued the campaign anyway.
If the evidence ultimately shows that the union arranged or continued the email campaign with full knowledge of the effect it would have, that doesn't seem outrageous to me, especially because "email campaign" here is not just speech encouraging people to send emails. The union made set up its server to send the emails for people -- something more active than just speech.
Makes you not want to be an American.
I hide in shame.
They gained us those things.
Now most are out for their own power. The days of unions approaching a company with an honest effort to help the employees are waning.
It's not an isolated bad action. It's standard operating procedure.
I send over 5,000 personal e-mails a month to various contacts. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The judge doesn't have one.
1) the union used a robo-dialer to spam the office with phone calls (so they couldn't receive customer calls)
2) they encouraged their members to 'fight back' and send 'thousands of emails'
3) the company asked them to stop
4) the union refused to stop
This is not communication of the like of a letter writing campaign. It seems that it was clearly intended to disrupt and overwhelm the office.
Critically, the company asked the union to stop - but the union continued.
So actually, it looks like a deliberate, malicious denial of service attack which was made more effective by the fairly weak email system.
In that context it seems like a reasonable judgment, and application of an appropriate law.
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
Shows how little these judges think about their ruling and the impact it can have, so now everybody is hacking everybody, and everybody can be charged by everybody else, and no one can claim otherwise...
Does this mean the U.S. president can be brought up on charges for "hacking" congressional websites after he asked Americans to contact their congressmen and they brought down many U.S. congress websites?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2753867/posts
It apparently was a form on the web site, click to generate a pre-written email. For reference, this union has over half a million members, each of which as asked to click and click again.
In the end, they stated their intent of disruption and didn't stop when told it was overloading systems. They're just as guilty as a DDOS or mass spammer.
It's the intent plus the effect. The intent was to impact the availability of the company's systems and thus their ability to conduct business. The effect was the same. That is illegal, and a civil tort. This cannot be equated to slashdotting because we go their to read the articles, not to purposely DDOS their systems. The law requires intent.
That it was coordinated among thousands should bring in RICO charges too. For once I'd like to see some modern union bosses go to jail for their tactics.
This is a ruling on a 12(b)(6) motion, which basically takes all allegations of the plaintiff as true. The ruling does not state that "emailz" equals "hax0rs." You guys are all m0r0ns.
First fact: This union did not represent one employee at that company. You would have seen, if you had read the court documents, that it is a non-representative union.
This union found out about the firing of one of their supporters who worked at the company. Despite the fact that the firing was for malfeasance (including the hiring of illegal aliens, something that could get the company in serious trouble with the law), they leveraged it into a portrayal of firing for supporting the union by wearing a T-shirt.
The people complaining had no relation to the company whatsoever. They were outsiders, part of a coordinated campaign to hinder the operations of the company through saturating its phone, voice mail and email systems.
Over 600,000 individuals on tap to send pre-written and pre-addressed complaints with a click to a few specific email accounts. Not everything has to be automated. There's also good old-fashioned group effort.
All attacks are relative. If you, by any means, flood a system with the knowledge that the flood is of sufficient strength to affect the availability of that system, and with the intent of hindering the availability of that system, then you are purposely performing a DOS. That is illegal.
That it was coordinated and occurred across state lines, federal felony charges should be certainly brought.
Based on the rather skimpy information available to this writer, this may illustrate just another example of ignorant and uninformed judges running amok. No one should assume that judges are not petty, ignorant and power-mad just because they have been appointed or elected to that office. They can be and often are just as stupid as everyone else. Good luck with further appeals.
Another analogy:
You look healthy but have a weak heart, I don't know it, I scare you at the Halloween party, you die.
You have a weak heart, I know it, and I want you dead for some reason that I stand to gain from. I scare you one day to kill you, you die.
Nothing changed here but the intent. One is an accident, while the other is first-degree murder. We don't intend to bring a server down. In fact, most sites can handle a good slashdotting. We even put up mirrors to alleviate the slashdotting.
This union intended to take down the company's phone, voice mail and computer systems. That they're probably running a base install of Exchange on a small server doesn't matter. They shouldn't have to buy a better system or hire better admins because a 600,000-strong union has a coordinated, semi-automated email campaign aganst only a few mailboxes.
It is not a crime based on the weakness of the victim or lack thereof. It is a crime based on the intent of the action and the effect on the victim.
It's still called breaking and entering even if I don't lock my door. My lack of defensive measures does not constitute permission to take advantage of that fact.
The union is also a corporation, with assets over $140 million and executives who are mostly one-percenters in income.
This corporation is in the game to grow itself too. Thishis attack is part of the standard campaign designed to extort the company into working with the union to force the workers to join that union under a union contract with the company.
Absent this extorted company cooperation, the union would have to organize the old fashioned way -- convince the workers the union is a good deal for them.
The court cited it and found so. In addition, they persisted once notified of the effects of their campaign.
Supreme Court precedent says that an illegal act does not receive First Amendment protection, specifically in a union extortion RICO context.
I have no double standard. Show me a corporate executive doing RICO stuff and I'll support him going to jail.
That's what we base crime on now?
You whack me in the head and kill me. You shouldn't be subject to a murder charge on the idea that I should have had a stronger head?
That everybody else is competent at tech. They're a company, they must have their stuff set up well. A few hundred thousand emails hit just a couple boxes, they fill up, the admins are incapable of handling it. It's that easy. Looking at their current openings, this multi-billion dollar company with over 13,000 employees has a single IT position open, a low-level web developer. They don't look too hot on IT, which is common for the construction industry.
Again, the fact that the admins are incapable does not excuse the act of the aggressor. That woman wouldn't have been raped if she had known self defense, so the rape is her fault, not the rapist's?
Yes, many companies are tech-adverse. "We do construction, not computers!" That one IT job I found for them wasn't even in the home building division, it was in the mortgage division. Companies like this are prefect for the cloud, because they don't even have the will to create a decent IT infrastructure.
I knew an admin in the federal government who set up a stock proxy. That's it. Just installed it and put it online. It was a hacker's favorite for quite a while. Don't assume that level of competence is relative to organizational size.