City apologizes for ORBZ shutdown....
On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 07:04:36AM -0800, mdonahue@WATG.com said:
*sigh* http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/article/0,,8_996341,00.html
from the article ... ---- "Our investigation and conversations with Mr. Gulliver's attorney have led us to believe that there was no criminal intent to cause the City harm," she [assistant to the city manager Michelle Reen] said. "However, there was no way for us to know when we received the hit that this was not intended as a malicious prank." Battle Creek's information systems expert and a local detective were responsible for convincing a judge to issue a search warrant and seek to seize Gulliver's ORBZ documentation. ---- I can believe this kind of clueless, heavy-handed behavior from law enforcement, but apparently their information systems 'expert' could stand a course or two on common Internet practices. Like spam filtering, and relay databases - anybody that can't differentiate between a probe from a known open relay tester, and a portscan, needs to be sent back to school. Contrary to the city manager's assistant, there certainly _is_ a way they could have known whether the 'hit' was malicious or not. They could merely have _asked_, instead of starting out with a court order. I echo Mike - *sigh* -- Scott Francis darkuncle@ [home:] d a r k u n c l e . n e t Systems/Network Manager sfrancis@ [work:] t o n o s . c o m GPG public key 0xCB33CCA7 illum oportet crescere me autem minui
I love it: "The detective had no reason not to believe he was pursuing a hacker when he issued a search warrant," Reen said. "The purpose of the search warrant was to determine the identity of the person who sent the email that caused our system to fail so we could then determine whether further investigation would be necessary." So now, instead of the legal system being the last recourse when reasonable people can't settle their differences, it's the first place you go. No wonder we're such a litigious society. I think there's a tiny bit of an actual operational issue here. Apparently, some people don't understand how to interact with each other about Internet issues that cross providers. If there had been an actual malicious hacker, in the time it took to get a search warrant and talk to ORBZ's attorney, many other sites could have been compromised and the logging information needed to track the perpetrator could have been lost. David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com> -- We're interested in USENET peering relationships in Northern California. Email for info.
participants (3)
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David Schwartz -
Mike Donahue -
Scott Francis