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Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft
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------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 08:56:08 -0400 From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: politech@politechbot.com Subject: FC: Russian hacker's arrest sparks online protests not seen in years Send reply to: declan@well.com
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,45342,00.html
Hacker Arrest Stirs Protest By Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com) 2:00 a.m. July 19, 2001 PDT
WASHINGTON -- When the FBI arrested a Russian programmer this week on charges of criminal copyright violations, the government unwittingly ignited a powder keg of outrage.
Web pages immediately sprouted to demand the release of Dmitry Sklyarov, who was visiting the United States to describe his work at the Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas. Newly minted activists set up a mailing list, launched a defense fund, and trashed Adobe Systems for urging the U.S. government to arrest Sklyarov on charges of circumventing its copy protection methods. [...]
This high-visibility prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act seems to have focused the kind of anger not seen since the days of the 1996 Communications Decency Act or the Secret Service raid of Steve Jackson Games -- two defining moments in the development of civil liberties online.
From the federal government's point of view, it's merely enforcing a law enacted by Congress in October 1998 that punishes anyone who distributes "any technology, product, service, device, component or part" that, like Sklyarov's software, bypasses copy-protection mechanisms. Sklyarov is facing a five-year prison term and a fine of $500,000.
Matthew Parrella, a federal prosecutor in Las Vegas, said a judge on Monday decided to hold Sklyarov without bail until his hearing in California some time in the next two weeks. "The court deemed him a risk of non-appearance, which is not uncommon with white collar criminals," Parrella said. [...]
Yet from a programmer's perspective, Sklyarov was simply following the venerable hacker tradition of exposing weaknesses in a security system -- in this case the often-flawed security of e-books -- in a smart, clever way. He received even higher points for documenting his research and presenting his work at Defcon last weekend on behalf of ElcomSoft. [...]
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