Despicable attack by NS Premier, Cops, on teen

Fifteen cops showed up to arrest a teenager for using the internet

CBC reporter Jack Julian interviewed the 19 year old who was arrested in the mischaracterized “data breach” of the province’s Freedom of Information website. Julian’s article is a great piece of reporting; it is well-written, sensitive, informative, and enraging.

If police statements about how the teenager accessed the information are correct, the teenager did nothing at all wrong. He wrote a script to help him download documents from a public-facing website. He didn’t “hack” anything. He didn’t misrepresent himself. He didn’t try to hide his identity or mask his web presence. In fact, he didn’t do anything plenty of people and businesses legitimately do every day. A rich detail: the teenager was downloading the documents in order to research the government’s dispute with the teachers’ union.

Moreover, there’s been no allegation that the teenager used the documents he freely accessed to cause any harm. He didn’t steal identities or sell data.

No one with the provincial government or with the Halifax police department has provided any information to suggest that the the situation is anything other than described above.

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The only way that I can understand why the province is so overreacting — going so far as Premier Stephen McNeil deeming a teenager guilty of a crime he hasn’t yet even been arraigned for — is that it is in major butt-covering mode.

The overreach goes right to the Halifax police,....

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I’ve seen more subtle police raids to arrest people charged with murder.

There’s simply no excuse for this. None. The Halifax police have a lot to answer for.

But, the police do what the police do. The outsized police response was itself in response to a directive or complaint from the province. As someone pointed out to me last night on Twitter:

Quote:

There had to be someone who made an allegation of wrongdoing to start this off; that person needs to be accountable to what appears to be an instance of swatting to cover up technical incompetence by the government. — Kevin McArthur (@KevinSMcArthur) April 16, 2018

(Halifax Examiner)

SEE ALSO:

Nova Scotia filled its public Freedom of Information Archive with citizens' private data, then arrested the teen who discovered it

A 19 year old in Nova Scotia wanted to learn more about the provincial teachers' dispute, so he filed some Freedom of Information requests; he wasn't satisfied with the response so he decided to dig through other documents the province had released under open records laws to look for more, but couldn't find a search tool that was adequate to the job.

He noticed that the URL for the response to his request ended with a long number, and by changing that number (by adding or subtracting from it), he could access other public documents published by the government in response to public requests.

So he wrote a one-line program to grab all the public records, planning on searching them once they were on his hard-drive. On Wednesday morning, 15 police officers raided his home, terrorising his family (including his very young siblings -- they scooped one of his younger brothers up as he was walking home from school, arresting him on the street) and seizing all the family's electronics, including the phone and computer his father depends on for his livelihood. The young man now faces criminal charges and possible jail-time.

The reason for the raid and the arrests? The government had unwisely uploaded private, confidential documents to its open directory of public open records, and so they are charging this teen with improperly accessing these confidential documents.

(BoingBoing)

via ehMac.ca https://ift.tt/2HtQ936