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Bradley Manning and the 'Hacker Madness' Scare Tactic
New submitter wabrandsma sends this excerpt from New Scientist:
"The Bradley Manning case continues a trend of government prosecutions that use familiarity with digital tools and knowledge of computers as a scare tactic and a basis for obtaining grossly disproportionate and unfair punishments, strategies enabled by broad, vague laws like the CFAA and the Espionage Act. Let's call this the 'hacker madness' strategy. Using it, the prosecution portrays actions taken by someone using a computer as more dangerous or scary than they actually are by highlighting the digital tools used to a nontechnical or even technophobic judge. ... We've seen this trick before. In a case that we at the Electronic Frontier Foundation handled in 2009, Boston College police used the fact that our client worked on a Linux operating system with "a black screen with white font" as part of a basis for a search warrant. Luckily the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed out the warrant after EFF got involved, but who knows what would have happened had we not been there. And happily, Oracle got a big surprise when it tried a similar trick in Oracle v. Google and discovered that the judge was a programmer who sharply called them on it."
Original article on EFF blog.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The real reason the government targeted Mitnick was that he found out the NSA was spying on citizens without warrants and downloaded the source code.
The real way the government caught Mitnick is that his ex-wife ratted him out.
Mitnick spent almost a year in solitary subject to psychological torture that is not only unconstitutional but even a violation of the Geneva convention.
Then when the international press found out they put him in general population and had gang members pick fights with him.
Look at how the government removed the head of Qualcom when he refused to betray US citizens to the shadow government. They fabricated false insider trading charges and arrested him, threw him in prison and replaced him with a government stooge to facilitate spying on citizens (or should I say serfs?) without warrants.
I figure most of us know what happened to Mitnick, but just in case, what happened was that the government convinced a judge that Mitnick could literally launch America's nuclear-armed ICBMs merely by whistling into a phone.
.: Semper Absurda
The TSA thought my titanium solo cookset and matching titanium fork, stuffed into a mesh bag, looked like a bomb made out of "a razor blade and wires." So, they don't even have to be real electronics or wires.
.: Semper Absurda
It's in TFA.
In the Manning case, the prosecution used Manning’s use of a standard, over 15-year-old Unix program called Wget to collect information, as if it were a dark and nefarious technique. Of course, anyone who has ever called up this utility on a Unix machine, which at this point is likely millions of ordinary Americans, knows that this program is no more scary or spectacular (and far less powerful) than a simple Google search. Yet the court apparently didn’t know this and seemed swayed by it.
The prosecution made a big deal about this during the trial. If you read the transcripts of trial, in particular the opening statement from the prosecution, wget gets mentioned numerous times, including once as a tool that provides a "technical boost" to downloading.
The "hacking" laws are written in terms of access, which is contextual. Manning had access to the systems to do the work for which he was employed by the DoD. He did not have access to copy off files and give them Wikileaks. So he did violate those laws.
Only if you redefine the word "access".
If I created an account for you on my system, and made you a super-user, you have access to all kinds of stuff... config files, creating users, installing software. This doesn't mean you have my approval, but I did give you access to them.
Redefining the word (in noun form) to mean something else is an exceptionally dangerous road to go down. If someone misreads an order (judicial or executive) and does something unintended, do we really want them becoming a sacrificial scapegoat? Do they not have "access" because they didn't have actual permission? Wouldn't we prefer to nail those who shouldn't have given them access or those who gave bad instructions? Do we just assume that because children aren't allowed in a bedroom that they don't have access to the gun under the pillow? Do we want that legal defense?
"Access" cannot be equated to verbal or paper permission. Access (noun) is the ability to access (verb) something, not the authority to do so.
He accessed something that he wasn't supposed to, but to which he had access. What he did with it was clearly illegal. He shouldn't have been given access, but that's a whole different ball of wax.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The King James Version is written in Early Modern English, not a medieval variety (the differences between the KJV and the Middle English of, say, Chaucer or Old English which were spoken within the medieval era is significant).