YOU are a computer criminal! Yes, you! EVERYBODY is! | Hacker News Reader

YOU are a computer criminal! Yes, you! EVERYBODY is!

boingboing.net

43 pointssurrealize18 comments

Careful what you wish for, one day they may just change into something like a speeding ticket.

Then governments will start to see it as a revenue source.

With your ISP bill you will get your citations, you'll have to pay a fee, attend an internet-school (ala driving school) etc.

Then entire industries will spring from the criminal side of it, all those idle lawyers will now market themselves to get you out of internet tickets.

And then it's part of the system so they can never stop doing it as unemployment levels would jump.

It would be nice if BoingBoing actually linked to this book:

"Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...

If you visit a website and fail to follow it's terms you are committing a federal crime? Really?

What's to stop somebody building a webpage where the terms of service just says "you must never visit this webpage for any reason"

Remember the guys who found that AT&T was publicly showing iPad user email addresses (in the clear, without any authentication) on its website? One of them wrote a script to visit a series of URLs on that site, incrementing a number at the end of the url each time, and collecting those email addresses. Then he used the emails to publicize AT&T's info leak.

The script just visited publicly visible web pages and collected some information from them. The guy who wrote the script was convicted under the CFAA (the same law used to prosecute Aaron Swartz) of conspiracy to access AT&T’s computers without authorization.

So, what's authorization? If visiting a publicly accessible web page can constitute unauthorized access, then your hypothetical is indeed the case, e.g.:

http://cfaadefensefund.com/

Surely intent is important though?

I mean, if I send a GET request to a URL on the internet it can be assumed that by making the URL public you consent to that.

However if that GET request is including fragments of SQL then and you manage to dump contents of the database using that then that would be a more clear cut case of abuse even though you are just sending GETs to a public URL.

Bought something online across state lines?

Did you pay the state and local taxes?

If no, YOU are a tax evader.

Worthless satire without concrete examples. Don't say "and failed to follow its Terms and Services", show actual terms that are likely to have been broken.

I regularly bypass NYTimes paywalls by opening an incognito window. Is that against T&S? Is that a federal crime? The T&S and federal law being broken must be explicitly stated for this comic to have any useful impact.

A lot of websites have terms that forbid deep linking.[1] (This means that I'm not allowed to link to their TOS.)

[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking)

Yes. You're accessing an information system without permission, which is an offence under Title 18 U.S.C. Section 1030.

Edit: here you go: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

Paragraph a (2) (C). Congratulations, you're a felon.

Oh, paragraph a (5) (A) as well.

Gosh, 10 years hard time - C (1) (A).

Precise enough?

To be honest, most of us are probably computer criminals even if it wasn't for all of that.

In fact, we're probably all generic criminals anyway. That's how the government likes things.

I refuse to read this link bait. Flagged.

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Having read the article on recommendation that it was satire, I found it humorous. I still disagree with the title.

It is actually worth reading.

I flagged it for not being detailed or funny enough, and essentially just being an image submission when such things should be relegated to links in the comments...

The sad part is that it's not satire, it's cold hard reality.

Ah, yeah, I can understand your reaction. The link is satire; out of context I suppose this quote sounds pretty over-the-top.

Flagged for what? Illustrating an important point with imagery rather than a wall of text?

Flagged for a link bait title.

This.

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