Police Drop Charges Filed Against 19-Year-Old Archivist For Downloading FOIA Releases (techdirt.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report form Techdirt: Last month, [...] an unnamed 19-year-old was facing criminal charges for downloading publicly-available documents from a government Freedom of Information portal. The teen had written a script to fetch all available documents from the Nova Scotia's government FOI site -- a script that did nothing more than increment digits at the end of the URL to find everything that had been uploaded by the government. The government screwed up. It uploaded documents to the publicly-accessible server that hadn't been redacted yet. It was a very small percentage of the total haul -- 250 of the 7,000 docs obtained -- but the government made a very big deal out of it after discovering they had been accessed.

Fortunately, Nova Scotia law enforcement has decided there's nothing to pursue in this case: "In an email to CBC News, Halifax police Supt. Jim Perrin did not mention what kind of information police were given from the province, but he said it was a 'high-profile case that potentially impacted many Nova Scotians.' 'As the investigation evolved, we have determined that the 19-year-old who was arrested on April 11 did not have intent to commit a criminal offense by accessing the information,' Perrin said in the email."

Comments

... but when does he get his hardware back ???

[eric31415927]

His hard drives contain sensitive info that may preclude him from ever getting them back.
Hopefully his other family members get their computers back.

Re:Intent?

[phantomfive]

Intent is an important part of many laws. For example, it is entirely legal to carry lock-picking tools, but if you carry them with the intent of committing a crime (or even merely have them while committing a crime), that is illegal. I don't know the specifics of Canadian law, but presumably intent is an important aspect of the particular hacking law he was accused of breaking.

In America, if you use someone else's computer in any way with the intent to hack, even just typing a simple sql exploit into your browser URL bar, then you've committed a crime.

If it's on a public facing server...

[grep -v '.*' *]

If it's on a public facing server it's "fair game", whether it's supposed to be or not.

And "did not have intent to commit a criminal offense" -- maybe this is just in the US, but I thought that "ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law." If he broke a law, let's have him and the law he broke. If not, let him go -- and then let's update all the knowledge of the people who thought he did so this doesn't happen again. (Tech AND Legal.)

I don't necessarily mind misteaks :-), but not for a second time. (And can you imagine -- the police arresting you just for accessing a public website?)

Sounds like he broke the law: "I don't like what you're doing." Where is that one written down anywhere? Or is this the "Nice place you've got here, shame if something ..." law?

Re:Intent?

[houghi]

"knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access"

But he did not do any of that. He did not defraud anybody. He did not access a protected computer (with or without authorization). He did not exceed the authorized access as no authorization was given.

It is as if you walk on the grass in a public park where it is allowed and then be arrested because you walked on all of the grass over time, walking back and forth.

So even if he did it to sell it to the Russians and had any intend to sell it, that does not make it illegal.

I have done a simmilar thing in the past where a friend asked me to rip a website so he would have info on companies, so he could sell his product to those companies by knowing how much they needed.
This was public available information. All I did was automate the process instead of him going through it page by page. Got a few beers out of it.