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Teen charged in Nova Scotia government breach says he had 'no malicious intent' | CBC News

wetwareproblem:

missalsfromiram:

This is evil. A teenager in Nova Scotia faces up to 10 years in prison for typing a URL into an address bar. This news article was the original source but this site offers a more concise write-up (with all the same info that’s in the CBC article):

A 19 year old in Nova Scotia wanted to learn more about the provincial teachers’ dispute, so he filed some Freedom of Information requests; he wasn’t satisfied with the response so he decided to dig through other documents the province had released under open records laws to look for more, but couldn’t find a search tool that was adequate to the job.

He noticed that the URL for the response to his request ended with a long number, and by changing that number (by adding or subtracting from it), he could access other public documents published by the government in response to public requests.

So he wrote a one-line program to grab all the public records, planning on searching them once they were on his hard-drive. On Wednesday morning, 15 police officers raided his home, terrorising his family (including his very young siblings – they scooped one of his younger brothers up as he was walking home from school, arresting him on the street) and seizing all the family’s electronics, including the phone and computer his father depends on for his livelihood. The young man now faces criminal charges and possible jail-time.

The reason for the raid and the arrests? The government had unwisely uploaded private, confidential documents to its open directory of public open records, and so they are charging this teen with improperly accessing these confidential documents.

I find that the CBC article, while containing all the same info, is excessively credulous towards the Nova Scotia government’s framing of the issue. E.g.:

19-year-old says he believed documents were ‘free to just download’ from province’s FOIPOP web portal

…They were free to download.

@allthecanadianpolitics