On Thu, 2010-04-29 at 16:47 -0500, William Pitcock wrote:
Surely even at DeVry they teach that if you refuse to hand over passwords for property that is not legally yours, that you are committing a crime. I mean, think about it, it's effectively theft, in the same sense that if you refuse to hand over the keys for a car that you don't own, you're committing theft of an automobile.
I've seen a dismissed employee withhold a password. The owner of the company threatened legal action, considering it, like you, theft. My father-in-law is an attorney, so I asked him about the situation. He said that it wouldn't be called "theft," rather "illegal control." http://www.infoworld.com/t/insider-threat/terry-childs-still-faces-one-charg... The more-informed reporting on this says that the charge was actually "illegal denial of service." I'm guessing this is what my father-in-law was getting at, or that this is what "illegal control" means when applied to computer equipment. dk