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Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

Could people who picked up pieces of confetti and stuck them together in order to decipher their contents be charged with a crime, similarly to how people have been prosecuted for "hacking" by retrieving information through trivial tinkering with public URLs?

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If they were to actually exploit their possession of the information (eg. get credit in the person's name by piecing together confetti with name, DOB, and SSN), it would be a crime.

The tricky thing is that with hacking, the line between piecing together the vulnerability and exploiting it doesn't involve as much clearcut intent and harm.

What if they'd just sent a box of the shredded documents to Gawker?

Then Apple bans Gawker from WWDC of course: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364707,00.asp

It depends on the well-accepted legal test of whether or not they were wearing Guy Fawkes masks at the time.

>> similarly to how people have been prosecuted for "hacking" by retrieving information through trivial tinkering with public URLs

I had no clue that happened. Scary.

Good example of it here: http://risky.biz/minter (direct object reference in URL)

It goes back to really old case law as to "allowed" access to a computer system.

Basically if you see a url with /foo.html?user=1234 and you go, hmm lets switch the number to 1235 and see what happens. Basically that is outside of reasonable expectations to access a system. Or something like that, i'm not a lawyer but that is how I understand the case law works for now.

The article said things were horizontally shredded so full text was visible in places. IANAL but I don't think you can be charged with seeing something that's as plain as day.

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