[free-sklyarov] Yet another FBI-involved incident

[Richard M. Smith]

Vadim,

   >>> http://www.linuxfreak.org/post.php/08/17/2001/134.html
   >>> IMHO the article is perfectly clear. Read it for yourself.

I think that anyone who is interested in this story, should carefully
read over the 4 pages of comments posted after the Linux Freak story.
Apparently some of the players involved in the situation are providing
information beyond what the story itself had to say.  My impression
after reading the comments as well as some earlier news reports is what
happened is a bit more complicated than the Linux Freak story leads one
to believe.  This news story in particular is very interesting:  

   http://www.bkw.org/pdf/stigler-news-hack.pdf

(Please ignore the dumb definition of "hacking").

I have always felt that it can be very risky to do too much research on
security holes on other people's Web servers without their permission.
It is particularly problematic if the servers belong to a direct
competitor which apparently is the case in this story.

The reason that the FBI and US attorney's office got involved is that
they are alleging that a few hundred files where downloaded by Brian
West from a competitor's Web server.  Some of this files included
password files and Perl scripts owned by the competitor. 

Richard M. Smith
CTO, Privacy Foundation
http://www.privacyfoundation.org