Andrea Jasperson
http://www.convictedworld.com

The judge that took this decision should be tarred and feathered as well as the Scotland yard piece of craps.

I am so sick and tired of these corrupted and incompetent parasitic bureaucrates bringing down our societies! I hope that one day the rope will break on them!

When I am sent to a directory page for downloading (legitimate) files via FTP, while using the Web, I often cannot find what was said to be there, and I will then see if it might be in the directory above (..). I suppose this would be seen as illegal at least under the UK law being discussed; I don’t know about the U. S., where I live.

This is a troubling case and it’s apparent to me that the man did nothing at all wrong. The law needs revising, and his sentence needs overturning.

I would hope, though, that in any event his career will still be safe, as any potential employer worth working for should recognize the stupidity of this affair and be appareciative of this individual’s suspicions about the site. I would be suspicious, too, if I received no acknowledgment for a payment!

His actions were entirely understandable, IMO. They were not hostile
activities in themselves — they might have been the *prelude* to hostility,
in other cases, but not in this one.

Instead of making parallels with “rattling the doorknob” or “lurking around the
back door of a bank”, a better parallel would be looking through the bank’s
front window, from the street!

If only law enforcement took this degree of interest in genuine phishing cases,
where innocent parties find their bank accounts emptied by *real* criminals,
like the unprosected phisher in Quebec discussed in this USA Today article.

All in all, this case is a scandal.

Perhaps we should , say over a period of a month, actually formally complain to the Police about each and every email virus attachment and 419 phising scam, illegal pharmaceticals or porn or gambling offers etc that we get, and, optionally every suspicious alert from our firewalls and other security systems.

Thjis could easily be hundreds or thousands of “Computer Misuse Act” crimes, per person, per day.

This would show just how under reported actual computer crimes are, and might lead to the badly needed reform of the archaic , pre-internet era Computer Misuse Act.

It would also completly ruin the cosy deal between the Treasury and the Home Office, whereby David Blunkett got a couple of billion pounds extra to spend out of Gordon Brown, on condition that recorded crime fell by 15% over the next couple of years.

Proper recording of internet related crime would ruin any chance of those figures being achieved, except through spin and trickery.

http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/2004/07/blair_and_blunk.html

IIRC he was also using Lynx (a text based web browser) on Solaris (a UNIX derivant), which I believe added to the IDS tagging him as an attacker (I should point out that is from my /bad/ memory).

However the idea of arresting the guy is quite absurd – his cat walking aimlessly over the keyboard looking for attention could have done this. But there are better ways to go about checking the validity of a website – a whois for starters.

And what do you think the police will do? I’m sure that the police are trained to do two things with burglaries

1. Ask homeowner if they have insurance
2. Give them a crime number for the insurance company if they have.

They don’t want to know. Short on resources, of course.