[14675] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Feds admit error in hacking conviction
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Allen Simpson)
Fri Oct 17 15:17:21 2003
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 09:43:02 -0400
From: William Allen Simpson <wsimpson@greendragon.com>
To: "Cryptography (moderated)" <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
http://news.com.com/2100-7348_3-5092697.html?tag=st_lh
Federal prosecutors asked a San Francisco appeals court this week to
reverse a computer-crime conviction that punished a California man for
notifying a company's customers of a flaw in the company's e-mail service.
Filed on Tuesday in San Francisco's Ninth District Court of Appeals, the
unusual request conceded that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles erred in
bringing a criminal case against, and obtaining the conviction of,
30-year-old Bret McDanel. The one-time system administrator has already
served his 16-month sentence and is currently on supervised release,
during which time his access to computers is curtailed.
...
If the court agrees to overturn the conviction, it will remove a precedent
that could have squelched the research of many security experts. The
original conviction by U.S. District Judge Lourdes G. Baird determined
that, by revealing a flaw in a system's security, a researcher could be
accused of harming the system, a violation of computer crime laws.
...
Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office for the Central
District of California said that prosecutors rarely ask for a reversal.
"It's pretty damn rare," he said. "I have never seen it happen."
...
--
William Allen Simpson
Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32
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