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19-Year-Old Archivist Charged For Downloading Freedom-of-Information Releases (www.cbc.ca)

Posted by BeauHD on from the extracurricular-activities dept.

Ichijo writes: According to CBC News, a Canadian teen "has been charged with 'unauthorized use of a computer,' which carries a possible 10-year prison sentence, for downloading approximately 7,000 freedom-of-information releases. The provincial government says about 250 of those contain Nova Scotians' sensitive personal information."

"When he was around eight [...] his Grade 3 class adopted an animal at a shelter, receiving an electronic adoption certificate," reports CBC. "That lead to a discovery on the classroom computer. 'The website had a number at the end, and I was able to change the last digit of the number to a different number and was able to see a certificate for someone else's animal that they adopted,' he said. 'I thought that was interesting.' The teenager's current troubles arose because he used the same trick on Nova Scotia's freedom-of-information portal, downloading about 7,000 freedom-of-information requests." The teen is estimated to have around 30 terabytes of online data on his hard drives, which equates to "millions" of webpages. "He usually copies online forums such as 4chan and Reddit, where posts are either quickly erased or can become difficult to locate."

5 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Government guilty! by nospam007 · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...of criminal stupidity.

    I'm from Luxembourg and my chamber of representatives used the same 'security system' (people can't possibly guess numbers) and was also breached, obviously, since this 'problem' is known since 1991 or so, when the worldwide web was invented.

    1. Re:Government guilty! by JMJimmy · · Score: 4, Informative

      This case will be dismissed if it ever makes it that far. The law they charged him under does not cover accessing public facing documents.

    2. Re:Government guilty! by gmack · · Score: 5, Informative

      The kid was has been quoted as saying he thought that the records were public and he didn't know he wasn't supposed to be able to do that.

    3. Re:Government guilty! by suso · · Score: 4, Informative

      I agree, but man pages have nothing to do with gender. It's called a man page because it's short for manual. The command was called man most likely because so many commands were shortened back then to 2 or 3 letters. There were a few women working on Unix at Bell labs in the 70s, one was Lorinda Cherry and among other things she helped write programs like the 'bc' and 'dc' commands.

  2. In My Backyard by hipp5 · · Score: 4, Informative

    So I live in Nova Scotia; i.e. this is happening in my backyard. This is absolutely about the provincial government trying to cover its a**. The mistake was discovered internally when a government employee did basically the same thing and accidentally put in a wrong URL... and instead of getting a 404 got documents that shouldn't have been public-facing (including docs with personal info, SINs and the like). Rather than owning up to the mistake and dealing with the consequences, the provincial government kept it quiet for 7 weeks, and are now using this kid as a scapegoat ("EVIL HACKERS, CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS!!!!"). It's absolutely disgusting, and I hope the court of public opinion judges them (the gov) harshly.