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Comment by BadThink6655321 | Hacker News Reader

If they're my door handles, then yes. If they're public doors, then yes. Why, just yesterday, I tried the door of my favorite coffee establishment where the Open light was on but, unbeknownst to me, they had closed early.

The kid got documents on a public facing server. He did nothing wrong.

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A bit more complicated than that but I am sympathetic to this persons plight. What complicates this is if the website had a Terms of Use policy, if not then outside of existing statutes I can't see how he is guilty. Even if their are terms of use, I think these are useless if I have not agreed before entering the site. All very confusing.

The blame truly lies on the government for allowing such porous security. They should be glad a seemingly benign teenager discovered their flaw and not some more nefarious actor.

Violating Terms of Use is not a crime [1].

1: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/07/court-violating-terms-...

...for now. It's pretty clear which direction the legal profession wants to go.

This example is not entirely equivalent. My understanding is that the opinion of the court was that authorisation (for the definition of "without permission") cannot be decided based on method of access. I.e. if you have granted a user access to data, you can't later say they accessed it without permission because they used a proxy or bot to access it (in violation of your TOS).

A terms of service can not define law, but it can make explicit what data a provider is authorising a user to access.

I agree, however it is worth noting that this link probably only falls within the jurisdiction of the U.S.

I don't see any terms of use anywhere else, and it looks like the side is down now, but the official links to this site describes it:

"The Access to Information website allows you to submit, pay and receive FOIPOP requests online. The Nova Scotia Government also posts responses to formal FOIPOP requests online on the Disclosure log. This is a free public repository of FOIPOP responses that have been approved for publication and have met a specific set of criteria (PDF file 800 KB)."

I also have a huge problem with the stance that violating the "Terms of Use" policy of a website can result in criminal charges when accessing publicly available information.

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