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

Re:Hacker??!!

[Sarten-X]

This is pretty much like leaving a stack of pamphlets on a table in a train station, then arresting those who pick one up for possession of classified material.

That's pretty much exactly how classified material works. It doesn't matter how you got the information, or even whether you should have access to it. What matters is whether you followed proper security procedure with it, including labeling.

It's strict by design. Otherwise, a spy could copy classified information, remove the labeling, and just leave the information on a table for an accomplice to pick up. That accomplice could then undertake the risky operation of transporting the documents, but with little risk of a provable criminal prosecution. After all, he has a plausible defense of pleading ignorance.