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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).
Uh, no, they cannot. In the US that is known as "double jeopardy" and is not allowed. If you're acquitted, you're done. They can find new evidence, you can write a full confession, it doesn't matter. When that gavel comes down on the "not guilty" verdict, you're no longer capable of being held criminally liable for that particular crime.
If a case is dismissed without prejudice, it can be retried. There is no verdict in that scenario. There's also a separate sovereigns exception, which in some circumstances could allow the feds their own shot at prosecuting, though that wouldn't be applicable here since this would have been tried as a federal crime to begin with.
In the absence of any keep out signs, (there weren't any), even in France, public items are for free for public consumption.
The only strawman around here is you, and you seem to have most of it in your head.
This guy did nothing wrong. The documents were freely available on the web. There was no security on the site, and no copyright on the documents.
As he states on TFA:
Through a Google search which strictly did not have anything to do with ANSES or with public health, I found myself in the ANSES extranet. Simply by clicking on a search result.
First observation: there are a lot of documents freely available here.
Second observation: they speak about public health.
Third observation: L’ANSES is a public establishment.
Question: Is it that this ought to be public?
Response: (too) obvious at the time: yes.
And he was acquitted!!! But an embarrassed agency appealed..
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
In the absence of any keep out signs, (there weren't any), even in France, public items are for free for public consumption.
The only strawman around here is you, and you seem to have most of it in your head. This guy did nothing wrong. The documents were freely available on the web. There was no security on the site, and no copyright on the documents.
As he states on TFA:
The article has an update posted:
UPDATE: Laurelli ended up admitting in testimony that when he found the documents, he traveled back to the homepage that they stemmed from and found an authentication page. This indicated that the documents were likely supposed to be protected. That admission played a part in his later conviction in the appeals court.
In other words, he admitted to the court that he deliberately attempted to determine if the documents were intended to be publicly accessible or not, and had determined *to his own satisfaction* that they were likely not intended to be made public. That's probably why he was not acquitted on the basis of the documents being public. They were, to an uninitiated person. But Laurelli actually knew what he was doing and admitted to the court that he himself believed the documents were not intended to be publicly accessible. So while he thought they "ought to be" public, he also knew they were not intended to be. So by his own admission, he had the requisite intent to steal them from people who did not want them taken.
It seems the lower court acquitted him because all they knew was he got the documents through a public search, and did the right thing by acquitting him. And the appeals court also did the right thing in upholding that acquittal. What they convicted him of was the different crime of retaining and disseminating those documents *after* he realized they were not intended to be public.