In the Manning case, the prosecution used Manning’s use of a standard, over 15-year-old Unix program called Wget to collect information, as if it were a dark and nefarious technique. Of course, anyone who has ever called up this utility on a Unix machine, which at this point is likely millions of ordinary Americans, knows that this program is no more scary or spectacular (and far less powerful) than a simple Google search. Yet the court apparently didn’t know this and seemed swayed by it. We’ve seen this trick before. In a case EFF handled in 2009, Boston College police used the fact that our client worked on a Linux operating system with “a black screen with white font” as part of a basis for a search warrant. Luckily the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed out the warrant after EFF got involved, but who knows what would have happened had we not been there. And happily, Oracle got a big surprise when it tried a similar trick in Oracle v. Google and discovered that the Judge was a programmer and sharply called them on it. But law enforcement keeps using this technique, likely based on a calculation that most judges aren’t as technical as ordinary Americans, may be even afraid of technology, and can be swayed by the ominous use of technical jargon and techniques—playing to media stereotypes of evil computer geniuses. https://eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/manning-verdict-and-hacker-madness-prosecution-strategy
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 00:36:07 +0000
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