"AT&T screwed up in 2010, serving up the e-mail addresses of over 110,000 of its iPad 3G customers online for anyone to find. But Andrew Auernheimer, an online activist who pointed out AT&T's blunder to Gawker Media, which went on to publicize the breach of private information, is the one in federal court this week. Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation worry that should that charge succeed it will become easy to criminalize many online activities, including work by well-intentioned activists looking for leaks of private information or other online security holes. [Auernheimer's] case hasn't received much attention so far, but should he be found guilty this week it will likely become well known, fast." http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/11...man-who-revealed-att-leaked-ipad-user-e-mails I may be late to report on this, but here is a case involving someone who did not break any privacy laws, but only accessed the AT&T's clients' information as a demonstration because AT&T did not protect this information with passwords but instead made it accessible from the internet simply by providing its clients' email. Now this whistleblower is facing jailtime. The governments, their sponsors and partners often remind us we're stupid and cause of our own downfall if we don't protect our personal information by regularily changing passwords etc. But seemingly, they neglect to provide the minimum of security when protecting the personal information of people who entrusted this information to them. If they get exposed or repremended, nothing happens to them, but a lot happens to the whistleblowers. Seems like hypocricy and double-standards of the worst kind always carry the day.
Whistleblowers report crimes or misconduct to the appropriate authorities, they don't just report (sell?) it to the media. AT&T were clearly in the wrong here but that doesn't mean that how the people that discovered this flaw responded to it can't have been in the wrong too. The fact it led to the actual publication of all the e-mail addresses, which was totally unnecessary (but I'm sure got them lots of advertising revenue from extra hits), clearly suggests they went about it in the wrong way.
