http://news.com.com/2100-7348_3-5092697.html?tag=st_lh
Federal prosecutors asked a San Francisco appeals court this week to reverse a computer-crime conviction that punished a California man for notifying a company's customers of a flaw in the company's e-mail service. Filed on Tuesday in San Francisco's Ninth District Court of Appeals, the unusual request conceded that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles erred in bringing a criminal case against, and obtaining the conviction of, 30-year-old Bret McDanel. The one-time system administrator has already served his 16-month sentence and is currently on supervised release, during which time his access to computers is curtailed. ... If the court agrees to overturn the conviction, it will remove a precedent that could have squelched the research of many security experts. The original conviction by U.S. District Judge Lourdes G. Baird determined that, by revealing a flaw in a system's security, a researcher could be accused of harming the system, a violation of computer crime laws. ... Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office for the Central District of California said that prosecutors rarely ask for a reversal. "It's pretty damn rare," he said. "I have never seen it happen." ... -- William Allen Simpson Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]