don’t look now neo – knock knock, its the FBI
In keeping with our previous
discussion about hacker’s and the law I wanted to post a story that is making
a minor stir. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is not entirely a case of the FBI
being all gung-ho, but it is mildly disturbing none the less.
It might tell you something about how nervous this makes me that I am not going
to link to the FBI site.
So the Yankees website
got hacked. Shortly after that this random programmer decides he is going to
go see what happened – then he gets curious, then he tries to figure out how
it was hacked.
It so happens that the only way to really do that looks an awful lot like hacking
the site yourself. Just a sad fact of life. The protagonist of this little tale
has something
to say on the topic of why he did it. Another quote is useful as well.
| "Many of you seem to think I was “asking for it” by snooping around yankees.com so shortly after the hack. To those, I say: you’re missing the point of why I wrote this. This was not written to defend my actions, only to point out how easy it is for people to misconstrue your actions, and get law enforcement involved. This is not a problem, in itself, but when the aforementioned law enforcement has the power to just yank away weeks, possibly months, maybe even years worth of effort.. This is the problem." – full article |
So shortly after that the FBI shows up and takes his stuff…
| "Overall, they were pretty nice. They took 3 computers, 2 books (ORA’s DNS &Bind, and a book on kernel hacking), and various scraps of papers, which contained jotted down algorithms, code, and other stuff I had written while bored or designing." – full article |
Anyway. Interesting reading and the
link to the story will also let you read up on some user reactions to it
all. It’s on kuro5hin.org – a great site
in general for keeping up with things – kind of a thinking geeks slashdot.