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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

He should not only be fired, a criminal investigation needs to happen. He let random strangers work on 'critical infrastructure' using his credentials. Yes, it worked out. Yes, the consulting company had well intentions. But what if it didn't? For all we know there is a logic bomb ready to blow some electrical substation. It's about the violation of trust. Is this something a non citizen is even allowed to work on?

It would have been a great idea if he just presented himself has a consulting agency using foreign contractors, but what he ended up doing was immoral and most likely illegal.

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Criminal? This is the kind of warped thinking that lead to Aaron Swartz's death. Please chill out.

The moral of Aaron's death is not that everything should be legal. As snarfy pointed out, he granted access to systems of a "critical infrastructure" company without any idea who would gain access. This is and should be criminal, as widespread economic and human damage could possibly result if these critical systems went down.

I say this as someone who recently had to spend two weeks without electricity and running water in New York City.

>I say this as someone who recently had to spend two weeks without electricity and running water in New York City.

Oh, the humanity!

Two weeks without electricity in the winter. People die like that.

You realize there are large swaths of humanity that have no electricity. And that in the past and even today humans survive winters in much colder places than NYC without electricity.

Thousands of people have no electricity, running water OR HOME in New York all year round -- not just as a temporary inconvenience because of a storm.

And hundreds of millions, nay billions, have no access to electricity or running water in the third world. Most of them have no access to food or doctors either.

Poor thing, and was your latte not warm enough this morning?

Please get off the soapbox, this guy is not a criminal and no one is suggesting that "everything should be legal".

You're being rude. Anyway:

http://www.wsvn.com/news/articles/tracking_tropics/210089292...

Disparaging comments aren't really constructive. You have no idea whether the guy's a criminal or not - that depends entirely on the circumstances surrounding the case.

Surely it's in the best interest of society to ensure that allowing unvetted foreigners access to critical computer systems is illegal? Obviously the facts surrounding this case (which none of us know) determine whether this particular person is a criminal or not.

Potentially yes. It completely depends on the level of access he gave. If the systems that he gave uncontrolled and unmonitored access to are in any way critical (and if he didn't properly review the code produced by the contractors) then he could have created a huge security issue. If he was truly working on critical infrastructure then there's all sorts of criminal liability issues there.

The issue with Aaron Swartz's case is that the prosecuters decided to throw the book at him for crimes which caused very little damage. The two cases have pretty much nothing in common beyond "computers".

>If he was truly working on critical infrastructure then there's all sorts of criminal liability issues there.

Really? Under what laws?

Chill out dude. He was doing something at an individual level (successfully I might add) that corporations do readily without even the faintest idea of the how, why, or what.

Criminal? Please, how most corporations operate is what is criminal.

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