I don't understand why everyone in this message thread is being so obtuse about how he accessed the site. It DOESN'T matter what method you use to access the system under the CFAA. The thing that matters is intent.
If you disagree with that then fine. And whether anyone can actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt what someone's intentions are is infinitely debatable. But the fact of the matter is that the prosecution proved in a court that weev knowingly accessed a portion of a computer system that he knew wasn't meant to be open to the public and that he knew he did not have authorization to access. It doesn't matter that all he had to do was type in a URL. He knew those URLs weren't meant to be accessed by him, or at least that's what was proven in court.
I'm not really trying to get into a debate about whether the CFAA is a good law, I don't really think it is. But there's certainly evidence that weev broke the law as it's currently written. Yea he got a 200 status code back and we can endlessly debate whether that should mean someone is given permission to access the site. But I think, and the jury/judge agreed, that weev wasn't just poking around their website thinking that those URLs were open to the public. I mean come on, this wasn't just some random user who happened to type in a URL not knowing what it was going to access. Weev knew what the fuck he was doing. Whether there's actually enough evidence to prove that is of course up for debate, but as the law is currently written I think he was guilty.
> He stayed at his own computer. Typed in URLs.
I don't understand why everyone in this message thread is being so obtuse about how he accessed the site. It DOESN'T matter what method you use to access the system under the CFAA. The thing that matters is intent.
If you disagree with that then fine. And whether anyone can actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt what someone's intentions are is infinitely debatable. But the fact of the matter is that the prosecution proved in a court that weev knowingly accessed a portion of a computer system that he knew wasn't meant to be open to the public and that he knew he did not have authorization to access. It doesn't matter that all he had to do was type in a URL. He knew those URLs weren't meant to be accessed by him, or at least that's what was proven in court.
I'm not really trying to get into a debate about whether the CFAA is a good law, I don't really think it is. But there's certainly evidence that weev broke the law as it's currently written. Yea he got a 200 status code back and we can endlessly debate whether that should mean someone is given permission to access the site. But I think, and the jury/judge agreed, that weev wasn't just poking around their website thinking that those URLs were open to the public. I mean come on, this wasn't just some random user who happened to type in a URL not knowing what it was going to access. Weev knew what the fuck he was doing. Whether there's actually enough evidence to prove that is of course up for debate, but as the law is currently written I think he was guilty.