Thought you might like another perspective: ...
A GORRIE STORY
Here's the background: in October of 1994, Hirsh's stepbrother, a U of T grad student, said Hirsh could use his school-provided net account.
Almost certainly unauthorized use. The us of another person's account is almost always against school policy, and hence is likely to be a voilation of the law.
Hirsh used it to read news. He thought the net fascinating so began uploading copies of The Anarchives. Hirsh never tried to hide who he was -- he even included his home phone number, which is how the Super- Sleuth Sysadmins "found" him. Hirsh made similar use of an account belonging to "Ms X" -- a female Ph.D. student and friend of Stepbro's.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, and being easy to catch doesn't make you innocent of a crime.
This would have been a happy and otherwise normal arrangement except that in January, 1995, U of T engineering prof Jack Gorrie (gorrie@ecf.utoronto.ca), bossman of U of T's engineering computing facility computer, received a complaint from someone at the University of British Columbia about The Anarchives being posted to net news. The person wanted it stopped.
Interstate transport of stolen (presumably copyrighted) property, possible violation of national laws of both nations. Unauthorized use of the computers at the University of British Columbia.
Gorrie came to notice Ms X wasn't signing these documents, a Jesse Hirsch was. He also noticed Hirsh and another U of T student (the stepbro) exchanged email about the accounts. As Hirsh and his stepbro have different last names, Gorrie concluded a larger hacker conspiracy was afoot.
Reasonable assumption. The only way to find out different would be to violate the users' privacy by reading their mail, etc.
Gorrie launched into his Canadian rendition of Cliff Stoll, author of compu-crime-thriller _The Cuckoo's Egg_ -- in Gorrie's case, _The Loonie's Egg_. He "tracked" Hirsh for two months, recording every keystroke -- even though he had all three students' phone numbers.
Collected possible evidence. A good idea. Allerting potential criminals is a poor way to catch them and potentially dangerous. May not stand up in court as it is heresay - not exempt under the normal business record exception.
On March 8, 1995, he asked the cops to intervene. "I checked and found that the account was indeed being used to broadcast information on behalf of The Anarchist Organization," he wrote Detective Hugh Ferguson.
Sounds wise.
Thus it came to be that Jesse Hirsh was forced to model nude for Toronto's finest, with the blessing of U of T.
If he turned out to be a terrorist who was planning to blow up a building, you would have called this a tremendous piece of police work, they could have written a million-selling book, and you would hail the sysadmin as a computer age hero.
Stepbro got his own taste of U of T six-gun justice. Off in a Washington, D.C., engineering lab, he came under FBI investigation. Naturally, the FBI found nothing wrong because there was nothing wrong -- except for an over-zealous sysadmin using a meat cleaver to scratch an itch.
Try again. I assume that they found this was not a "real" terrorist. But to call it over-zealous is not right. S/he was doing the job and should be commended for trying to do it as well as s/he could.
CHARGES DROPPED
On Sept. 7, minutes before the case was to go to court, the prosecution dropped all charges. Hirsh agreed to pay a token settlement of $400 for four months of university computer use. U of T first claimed it was owed $1,560. Hirsh places the real cost at $60.
So Hirsh agreed that he had been illegally using the computer system and the case was settled with a monetary fine.
Hirsh devoted an issue of The Anarchives to the case. It spread around cyberspace. In it, Hirsh includes Gorrie's email address and asks people to send him their opinions. Quite a few did. They were rather unpleasant. Gorrie, miffed, used the U of T pipeline to have the stepbro make Hirsh shut up.
So what's fair for Hirsh is not fair for the Sysadmin? Sounds to me like you think it's OK for Hirsh to have people write nasty letters to the admin but not OK for the admin to respond via the step-brother.
After subjecting Hirsh to complete and devastating public humiliation, U of T was now pleading for discretion.
After Hirsh broke the law, he is trying to get even for being caught by harassing the people who caught him. ...
Hirsh wrote Gorrie privately, saying he was sorry Gorrie was getting nasty mail. Gorrie replied the whole affair was a "big misunderstanding." As they were _both_ misled, they were _both_ victims: Victim Hirsh was dragged down the street in handcuffs, fingerprinted, mugshotted, strip-searched and jailed for hours; Victim Gorrie received email that was mean to him.
Hirsh realized he was wrong to harass Gorrie and appologized for creating the situation. Gorrie gracefully called it a "big misunderstanding" and accepted the abuse as part of doing a tough job. -- -> See: Info-Sec Heaven at URL http://all.net Management Analytics - 216-686-0090 - PO Box 1480, Hudson, OH 44236