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Comment by tapland | Hacker News Reader

Medhelp has filed a police report against the reporting paper ComputerSweden late last night:

https://omni.se/medhelp-polisanmaler-tidning-efter-avslojand...

The crappy thing is that the psycho CEO that filed charges is 100% right. The journalist willfully and knowingly committed a data breach. There are no provisions in the law for "I did it for a good cause" or "I only demonstrated that it was possible."

Of course if he hadn't, he wouldn't have been able to write a story about it and the security holes would not have become public knowledge.

The laws in these areas are insanely antiquated and this is not the first time investigated people in power have tried to use them to silence or smear journalists. Freedom of speech is threatened.

On the other hand, the journalist couldn't have known it was a data breach until he/she actually verified that it was classified healthcare data.

The case should be dismissed.

If I understand correctly, the journalist did nothing more than accessing an entirely unsecured, public website.

I think in this case the argument actually applies. There is no action on the user's part that signifies bad intent. Maybe if they downloaded too many of the files, but otherwise I wouldn't expect the accusation to stick.

There must have been some intent for it to be a crime. It is not illegal to click on a public link on the web. Accessing sensitive data is not a crime in itself.

These accusations seem completely baseless. The data was public and could probably be found using one of several public search engines.

Apart from that, the journalists could also claim they were given the link by someone, in which case it would even be illegal to investigate the source. This lawsuit was not filed to win.

They were given the link by a source. Some individual who found it on shodan or similar.

As an individual I wouldn't want to publish info on a security breach though.

Diversionary tactics is the only thing it is.

He obviously has not heard of the Streisand effect [1] - not that any amplification of the issue at hand is needed here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

But it didn't seem to work. News have completely died down.

Yes, it is strange the way news like this gets buried so quickly. At least the lawsuit will make sure it will pop up every now and then, even if only in alternative media and possibly in ComputerSweden - although they might keep quiet about it while the lawsuit progresses.

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