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Here’s an interesting report (source) written by Gillian Branstetter of The Daily Dot that might have slipped through the cyber-cracks for some. Branstetter brings to attention the consequences of law enforcement’s misunderstanding of technology, which for one 14-year-old, could have resulted in a 10 to 20 year prison sentence.
Pasco County, Florida teen, Domanik Green (name released by individual and parents), decided to play a trick on a teacher he found irritating by changing the teacher’s computer background to an image of two men kissing. The password for the teacher’s computer was his own last name, numerous students knew the password, and apparently students had logged into the system before. In this particular case, however, the teacher was absent, and the substitute teacher, upon seeing the image on the computer, reported it to the school’s administration.
The Pasco County Sheriff’s Department got involved in the situation and charged the 14-year-old with “an offense against a computer system and unauthorized access, a felony,” according to a report by the Tampa Bay Times. The justification for this action apparently comes down to some encrypted FCAT files that were stored on the computer Green had accessed, and although he didn’t actually access the FCAT files, Sheriff Chris Nocco says he could have.
As Branstetter points out in his report:
“The insistence of the sheriff’s office on ‘what this teenager might have done’ is irrelevant, as it does not qualify as a crime—you can’t arrest people for having the chance to do something illegal and not taking it.”
Files for juveniles are sealed in Pasco County, Florida, so the county clerk’s office cannot provide an update on Green’s case, however according to the Tampa Bay Times report (source link above), the teen was released to his mother’s custody, and it was stated he would likely be granted pretrial intervention, which is basically a form of probation. Even still, this teen’s life has been greatly affected, and it’s mainly because the adults in the situation—from Green’s teacher to the Sheriff’s Office—don’t understand technology.
Green is being blamed for the fact the school’s security standards were extremely lax—the teacher used his own last name as a password (who does that besides our grandmothers?), and even after the school knew other students had accessed the database, the password still wasn’t changed. The Sheriff’s department is using Green to set an example by utilizing a law that was adopted in 1984 (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), on the premises that the teen could have broken a law.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act originally applied to few computers, mainly those involved in governmental of financial affairs, however by today’s standards this law is so vague that something as little as participating in a DDOS attack can earn you a decades-long prison sentence. Branstetter also provides an example of the harm this can do with the case of Reddit co-founder, Aaron Swartz, who faced up to 35 years in prison for downloading JSTOR documents from MIT’s network, and when faced with this sentence, committed suicide.
Judges at all levels of government continually embarrass themselves through ham-fisted attempts at rulings on technology, often with disastrous results. When Google was sued for supposedly wiretapping people’s Wi-Fi connections through its Street View cars, a judge declared Wi-Fi to not be a form of radio communication and therefore susceptible to federal wiretap regulations. Except Wi-Fi is a radio communication and the networks Google accessed were unprotected by passwords. – Branstetter
All of this can be especially hard to swallow when one takes online harassment into consideration. Online harassment and slander is allowed to flourish, simply because law enforcement has no idea how to deal with internet situations. For example, one Californian victim who was getting death threats online received no help from police as the officer she spoke to didn’t even know what Twitter was:
While some individuals are facing threats of bodily harm and death and receiving no help whatsoever due to law enforcement’s lack of technological understanding, teenagers are being arrested for changing screensavers… because of law enforcement’s lack of technological understanding. There’s a fat serving of cruel irony for you today. Cheers.
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This Article (The Consequences We Face for the Law’s Lack of Education in Technology) is a free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com.
