Cyberlaw

San Francisco Subway Shuts Off Cell Service, Hackers Get Angry

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I rode BART into San Francisco on Monday for dinner. As our train approached the Embarcadero station, the driver came on the intercom.

“We aren’t stopping at this station. Don’t want to drop you in the middle of a protest.”

So my roommate and I got off a block later and backtracked. We encountered a few clumps of would-be protestors wearing Guy Fawkes masks and bandanas. They might have been more intimidating, but many had hipster neck-beards curling out from underneath the masks. Mostly, though, there were a lot of riot police. A lot. Who were mainly just standing around.

The protest was in response to Bay Area Rapid Transit’s recent decision to temporarily turn off cell phone reception in four San Francisco stations, which was in anticipation of another protest, which was in turn a response to a recent police shooting in a San Francisco BART station.

Only in California do we have protests about protests. It’s all very dramatic, but where do law and technology fit in? As is the trend these days, pesky hackers broke into the BART Police Officers Association’s website on Wednesday and released personal information about the men and women who patrol the local subway system.

Read more about the allegedly horrible, no good, very bad policy decision that led to the hack after the jump….

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Two British P2P Lawyers Suspended for Being Bloody Wankers

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It doesn’t take much to get people riled up about peer-to-peer file sharing and everything that goes along with it. Who is the RIAA is suing or not suing? Which Oscar-winning director thinks illegal downloading is maybe kind of OK after all? The list goes on and on.

Often file-sharing doesn’t much concern us here at Above the Law, but sometimes the P2P attorneys themselves become important and/or easily despicable characters within the always-hot topic. A few months ago, I wrote about an attorney named John Steele. A court found his methods of going after P2P porn downloaders to be unsound.

Last week, two more British attorneys were fined almost £200,000 and suspended from practicing law for their unacceptable Internet pirate-baiting schemes.

Let’s see who these guys are and what they did….

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Don’t Mess With Your Friend’s Facebook; It Might Be a Felony

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When I was in college, it was not altogether uncommon for people to leave their laptops unattended with their Facebook accounts still logged in. It was not altogether uncommon for an enterprising prankster to creatively twiddle with said account. A little switch of sexual preference here, a mildly offensive profile picture there, and maybe a nonsensical new profile quote.

It was annoying, and at worst required minor social media damage control, but nobody seemed to care much.

Nowadays, people definitely care. The California Court of Appeals ruled on July 21 that the same sort of online mischief can lead to felony identity theft conviction.

Let’s learn more about Rolando S., a teenager who messed with the wrong Facebook account….

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FBI Rolls Out the Hacker Paddywagon in Nationwide Raid

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It’s been an unusually exciting month in the legal tech world. Several lawyers have been charged with (and cleared of) upsetting electronic crimes. An Am Law 100 firm got sued for allegedly screwing up e-discovery. I haven’t even had the time or need to write the same vague jibber-jabber about Google+ that everyone else on the Internet has already written.

This week, we’ve got more high-profile tech arrests, involving the members of an international hacker club who happen to be supporters of everyone’s favorite Australian albino.

For deets on the legal consequences of crashing PayPal’s website, read on….

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This Lawyer Had the Worst Neighbor Ever

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We’ve all had obnoxious neighbors. The stoners who play music too loud, the dysfunctional lovers who are always yelling at each other… it’s part of life.

Most of us, though, have not lived next door to our own personal cyber-terrorist. Minnesota attorney Matthew Kostolnik has.

His neighbor “launched a calculated campaign to terrorize his neighbors, doing whatever he could to destroy the careers and professional reputations of Matt and Bethany Kostolnik, to damage the Kostolniks’ marriage, and to generally wreak havoc on their lives.”

On Tuesday, the man who published child pornography and sent a death threat to Joe Biden, all under Kostolnik’s name, was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Keep reading to learn more about the worst neighbor since the door-kicking judge….

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Chinese Hackers Hijack Hundreds of Gmail Accounts

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This news is more than a little scary.

Google announced yesterday that hackers in China had gotten access to hundreds of Gmail accounts. And it wasn’t just anyone’s email. The attack targeted senior government officials in the United States, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries, military personnel, and journalists.

I have a feeling we will hear a lot more about this over the next few days. For the moment, let’s take a look at the details we know so far….

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Just Like Us, Europe Isn’t Sure How to Handle Net Neutrality

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Isn’t it annoying when the YouTube video you’re watching just stops loading right in the middle? Or when your Skype connection suddenly starts sucking in the middle of a video conversation?

Well, it turns out that in Europe, sometimes stuff like that doesn’t happen accidentally. Internet Service Providers intentionally “throttle” certain kinds of web traffic.

The European Union is sick of this. On Tuesday, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda threatened new legislation and public humiliation for companies that don’t allow consumers easy access to a free and open Internet. That’s right, kids; the net neutrality debate is hot in Europe, too….

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Hackers Probably Stole Your Email Address Last Weekend

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Raise your hand if you are a JPMorgan Chase customer. Now raise your hand if you’ve shopped at Best Buy. How about Citibank, Target or Walgreens?

Has everybody in the world raised their hands yet? Congratulations — your email address may have been stolen.

There was a data breach at Epsilon, a Texas-based marketing firm, last weekend, exposing the names and email addresses of potentially millions of their clients’ customers. I first found out about it when Chase emailed me. You might have gotten a similar alert from one of the affected companies.

Read part of the bank’s announcement and more about the breach, after the jump.

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Suing Hundreds of Anonymous People Will Not Make You Popular

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It’s not everyday you get porn, file sharing lawsuits, amateur motions to quash subpoenas, and a federal judge quoting Shakespeare’s King John, all wrapped up in a nice legal bundle of joy.

Here we go, from the beginning:

Chicago attorney John Steele, whose firm website is located at www.WeFightPiracy.com, represents CP Productions, the filmmakers behind — wait for it — Cowgirl Creampie. The movie was part of their website, www.chicasplace.com (obviously NSFW; I can’t believe I just looked that up in Starbucks).

On behalf of his client, Steele sued 300 people who allegedly downloaded and shared the movie via BitTorrent. No one actually knew, however, who these supposed downloaders were. The plaintiffs only had IP addresses — not names, phone numbers or mailing addresses.

Steele subpoenaed various Internet service providers to get the personal data. He spent months unsuccessfully trying to contact all of the defendants, who lived conveniently in a single Chicago apartment building all over the damn country….

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Lawsuit of the Day: YouPorn Sued for Sniffing its Users

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YouPorn logo

Image via Wikipedia

I’m not overly familiar with the popular porn spots around the Internetz, but I understand that a good number of people are big fans of the homegrown selections that can be found on YouPorn – essentially YouTube for naked, lascivious types. The site is currently the 72nd most popular site on the Web, according to people who rank that stuff.

Everyone’s turned on by different kinds of things. If you’re a YouPorn visitor, I hope you’re into being “sniffed.”

Last week, over at my list-loving home, I wrote about researchers who discovered that YouPorn is one of a number of sites that exploit a Web security flaw to look at visitors’ Web browsing history. Tech types call it “history sniffing” or “history hijacking.” (If you lust for the technical details of how YouPorn used Javascript to look at the color of visitors’ browser underthings, check that out here.)

YouPorn wanted to know what other porn sites its visitors had been unfaithful with, so it sniffed their browsers for a list of 22 other sexxxy sites. Looks like I’ve helped cause my first class action lawsuit. On Friday, two California men, miffed about getting sniffed, filed a complaint alleging cybercrime and violation of consumer law protections. They’re seeking class action status.

Any other classy YouPorn watchers want to hop on this one?

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Are We Going Too Hard On Kiddie Porn Possessors?

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child learns adult games.jpgFew are going to stand up in support of kiddie porn, even when it’s art. Last year, the Tate Modern proposed displaying a nude portrait of Brooke Shields at age 10. It caved on those plans after objections from the “obscene publications unit” of the London Metropolitan Police, according to Caveat Viator.

Caveat Viator offers a link to the portrait, but we’d advise against checking it out. (Go watch The Blue Lagoon instead.) Cyberlaw professor Eric Goldman calls child porn “toxic,” noting that “there is no easy way to legally cure even a single download of child porn.”

Even if it’s part of your “academic research.” A New York professor considering writing a book on how to define child porn is now serving a prison sentence because of images he downloaded in the course of his research, and images left in his cached folder from Web-browsing kiddie porn sites.

Sentences range. That professor got a one-to-three year sentence, while an Alabama man with an underage porno video discovered on his computer by the Geek Squad got 10 years, as we mentioned last week. That’s for hitting download and play, not for firing up a camera and hitting record. Is that a fair sentence, or are the penalties for kiddie porn possession too exxxtreme?

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A California Judge and a New York Justice Make Different Discoveries

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Tough kitten

Your Facebook profile photo should look like this if you file a personal injury lawsuit.

Kash here. Now that I’ve departed for Forbes, I see that Elie has to take care of the hand jobs around here. I hope you’re all satisfied with his treatment.

Meanwhile, I’m bringing you news of a less salacious sort — a tale of two lawsuits. One involves an artist who wants to get paid for his work and is suing a clothing company for breach of contract. The other features a university employee who wants to get paid for falling out of her allegedly defective chair and has filed a personal injury suit against the chair manufacturer (for breach of contact?).

The former gets to keep his Facebook and MySpace communications private, and the latter has to turn them over. Old electronic communications laws mixed with cutting-edge electronic communication on social networking sites translates into a confusing set of precedents around the country.

The two cases might leave you scratching your head over what’s discoverable in a civil suit, but personal injury lawyers can take away a concrete lesson. In addition to advising your clients to wear a neck brace to court, advise them to always slap one on for Facebook profile photos…

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