Forged Subway Passes - Boston
boston.com
boston.com
The cards have serial numbers, but they weren't checked? Seriously? Not even in the nightly audit report? They do a nightly audit report, right?
Billsf showed BART how to run an electronic ticketing system 15 years ago. Of course, he got prosecuted for it. But MBTA could surely have learned a thing or two. Amateurs.
I'm always amazed at the libertarians who freak out at the idea of subsidized transit (which is clearly what this is, even if there's a nominal balance sheet attached) as they drive their cars to work on the road system provided entirely at taxpayer expense.
When did MA repeal its gas taxes, license fees and taxes, and sales tax on auto related stuff?
It's a hypocrisy argument: government subsidies on transportation are bad, except for the method of transportation you use. Some people actually take those buses and subways and have different perspective.
Not so fast. The claim, which I refuted, was "which costs far more to operate and has zero "revenue")?"
Not enough revenue is very different from "zero revenue".
> It's a hypocrisy argument: government subsidies on transportation are bad, except for the method of transportation you use.
Except that I wasn't making an argument - I was showing that your "zero revenue" claim was false.
Note that it isn't at all hypocritcal to say that some subsidies are worse than others. And, when you're arguing for subsidies, you can't argue that all subsidies are bad.
Hiding mass amounts of state debt in the MBTA (along with effectively losing every negotiation with its union and failing to timely increase fares to market value as compared to other major US cities) has sandbagged public transportation in Massachusetts.
The MBTA trains leak when they get wet. Every day there are delays due to "signal problems". There's a major crash on the Green Line annually. Getting the basics of electronic billing is about fourth on the list of things that the MBTA needs to address.
Also, the T doesn't bother to count the number of passengers and compare it to the number of tickets sold.
Also, the T's management doesn't read Craigslist, and hasn't for years.
Passengers can get on & off the train at multiple points along the line. Counting passengers would not be very helpful.
I've seen it in action.
Crooks in DC figured out that paper farecards had the same bits encoded over and over for the length of the magnetic strip. So they'd get a high value card and literally splice it into multiple high-value cards. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/washington_dc_...
If a lawyer told you Javascript was not a programming language, you'd immediately think "Cripes, he's a bozo."
I would expect it to be hacker logic, but I still don't agree. Company X hired a contractor to produce keys. Contractor Y produced more keys than he was authorized to produce, and sold them on the side. Are those additional keys "fraudulent"? Was he authorized to produce and sell any number of them as long as he paid for them? Clearly he had no intention of paying for these, but that doesn't make the keys he sold on the side any less valid than the keys he was authorized to produce. He is certainly liable for his contractual obligations (the money owed per key), which the article states the MBTA is trying to recoup.
The actual legal system will look at this like printing fraudulent checks on authentic check paper.
In this case, by the payroll company that was in charge of printing checks. Does that make them fraudulent? Is cashing them a crime? I would expect the payroll company to be liable for the damages, but I would not expect the company to be prosecuted for fraud.
You have picked a particularly poor example because an unauthorized check deprives the account holder of the value of a check. An unauthorized MBTA pass deprives the MBTA of the possible revenue that a customer purchasing a discounted pass might have contributed, and additionally increases the operating costs (generally fixed) of the MBTA by little to none.
specifically, hacker-who-is-committed-to-piracy-being-noncriminal logic.
To my knowledge, most piracy cases are civil cases. I don't recall any being prosecuted by the Attorneys General.
(EDIT: I am wrong. High value for-profit cases are prosecuted as criminal offenses by the FBI under Title 17 §506.)
The illegality of this is about as controversial a proposition as "Javascript is a programming language."
I don't know what kind of argumentation that is supposed to be, but it doesn't suit someone of your stature. This is a complex situation that few or none of us are properly equipped to resolve, but I still expect reasonable discussions, or else what's the point of being here?
This is, in fact, not a complex situation. Law is not a magic, unknownable realm populated by wizards who have the sole ability to understand what it means. Hard questions in law are hard questions, like hard questions in engineering are hard questions, but this is not a hard question. It's only a hard question if you are ignorant of the law or are intellectually committed to law not working the way law actually works.
Printing a check which exceeds one's granted authority is, with absolute certainty, a crime. You seem to be hung up on the notion that the payroll company can print one check and, therefore, if it prints two checks, check #2 is kinda grey-area authorized. The law does not see things that way: if you're knowingly printing extra checks to with the extent of stealing from their account, it is screamingly illegal.
I mean, want to look at an actual law? Here you go, MA General Law Chapter 267 (Forgery and Crimes Against the Currency) Section 1 (False or forged records, certificates, returns, attestations and other writings)
"Section 2. Whoever, with intent to injure or defraud, falsely makes, alters, forges or counterfeits a railroad ticket, railroad mileage book or railroad pass, or a ticket, badge, pass or any written or printed license purporting to entitle the holder or owner thereof to admission to any exhibition, entertainment, performance, match or contest of any kind, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than three years or in jail for not more than two years, or by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars."
This is really not ambiguous. Was it unpredictable that this was the law in MA? No.
If one hypothetically believes that this case does not qualify as "falsely makes" or that the bad actor here didn't have "intent to ... defraud", one is wrong. One is not just a little wrong, or arguably wrong, or sort of grey area wrong.
Law is not a magic, unknownable realm populated by wizards who have the sole ability to understand what it means.
Law is not magic. But I am not a lawyer, and I don't think that many lawyers, let alone those who specialize in criminal prosecution or even intellectual property read Hacker News. Hence my claim that this is a complex issue for "us" to engage in, for which "we" are not fully qualified. My interest in this stems from the notion that we should be informed of the society we live in, and that Hacker News comment threads are places of philosophical discussion. Also, the Hacker News article uses the term "forged" instead of the article's "fake", and I think that both of these are incorrect. The passes produced were clearly valid, but unauthorized.
If one hypothetically believes that this case does not qualify as "falsely makes" or that the bad actor here didn't have "intent to ... defraud", one is wrong. One is not just a little wrong, or arguably wrong, or sort of grey area wrong.
I apparently lack your swagger. Given that the MBTA could not differentiate these passes from the ordinary pass, I claim that these passes are not "falsely made". In every way they behave as stolen passes, but not fake ones. Why does this matter? I suppose that I care because the headline "Forged Subway Passes" is the only reason this article belongs on Hacker News. But given that these are more "stolen" than "forged", there is nothing technically interesting about this event and it doesn't really belong here.
But our discussion has been interesting, because you have presented compelling arguments that this is actually fraud. I still believe that it is not, but the process of arguing has made me develop my intuition of something that I wouldn't normally have cared about. I certainly wouldn't have realized that I thought the event was theft and not fraud.
Agree with the other reply, the "hacker logic" comment.
Also worth noting as a pragmatic matter - throughout pretty much all of recorded history, enterprises with a close working relationship with the government have always gotten favorable legal treatment.
For instance, in Las Vegas, borrowing money from the casino and not paying them back is criminal! No joke. Why? Because the casinos fund the vast majority of Nevada income and have a close relationship with the state.
This isn't anything new. State-charted, state-controlled, or significantly-revenue-generating companies have pretty much always gotten favorable treatment under the law. If you really feel the need to screw with someone, you generally don't want them to be friends with the government.
Why is logic bad? Logic will be used by both the prosecution and the defense, as well as the judge. They will also employ their individual preferences when selecting their arguments, but logic is not simply ignored.
Also worth noting as a pragmatic matter - throughout pretty much all of recorded history, enterprises with a close working relationship with the government have always gotten favorable legal treatment.
To accept that the State is strong and does whatever powerful interests desire is spineless. We know it to be true, but to accept it is to be either complicit or cowardly.
"Accept everything just the way it is." - Miyamoto Musashi's first principle of the Dokkodo
Making statements of fact that are true is not cowardly. Note that I didn't make any value judgment of the current system. Just stated how things are.
That's always the starting point. How things actually are. You always start there.
True. But stating an undesirable reality as a retort to a philosophical question is to step past the starting point.
"Accept everything just the way it is." - Miyamoto Musashi's first principle of the Dokkodo
A good thing to keep in mind.
Because it is not really logic, in this case-- it's hacker-who-is-committed-to-piracy-being-noncriminal logic. In other words, it's an ex post facto justification of something based on little more than wishful thinking.
This case is open-and-shut. The guy produced counterfeit tickets, plain and simple.