Blogger Fined €3,000 for 'Publicizing' Files Found Through Google Search

mpicpp points out an article detailing the case of French blogger Olivier Laurelli, who had the misfortune to click links from search results. Laurelli stumbled upon a public link leading to documents from the French National Agency for Food Safety, Environment, and Labor. He downloaded them — over 7 Gb worth — and looked through them, eventually publishing a few slides to his website. When one of France's intelligence agencies found out, they took Laurelli into custody and indicted him, referring to him as a 'hacker.' In their own investigation, they said, "we then found that it was sufficient to have the full URL to access to the resource on the extranet in order to bypass the authentication rules on this server." The first court acquitted Laurelli of the charges against him. An appeals court affirmed part of the decision, but convicted him of "theft of documents and fraudulent retention of information." He was fined €3,000 (about $4,000).

Comments

French government

[DoofusOfDeath]

Often I marvel at how banal the American government is. Then, occasionally, the UK or French governments make me feel a little better.

Fortunately

[Greyfox]

Having learned from previous mistakes, the agency had taken the precaution of encrypting the documents using an incomprehensible standard known as "French," so no one really paid it any mind.