FC: Feds have not dropped charges; "Free Dmitry" website defacements

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Politech archive on U.S. v. Sklyarov:
http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=sklyarov

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http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,45484,00.html

   Sklyarov Release in Fed's Hands
   By Declan McCullagh (declan () wired com)

   2:00 a.m. July 24, 2001 PDT
   WASHINGTON -- America's geeks want Dmitry freed.

   Hundreds of hackers, programmers and system administrators decamped
   from their cubicles on Monday and took to the streets to argue, in
   dozens of different ways, that Dmitry Sklyarov should not be in jail
   for creating code-breaking software.

   Some geekavists, who turned out in at least 10 cities, targeted FBI
   and Justice Department offices. The largest crowd, with about 100
   demonstrators, marched on the San Jose headquarters of Adobe Systems,
   whose copy protection scheme Sklyarov has been charged with
   penetrating.

   Adding additional drama to the day was a high-stakes meeting taking
   place inside Adobe's headquarters while protesters outside were
   chanting "Code is speech" and "Hey, hey, ho ho, DMCA has got to go."
   Board members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has taken
   up Sklyarov's cause, were meeting behind closed doors with Adobe to
   try to broker a deal that would let the 27-year-old Russian avoid a
   trial.

   It seemed to work. After over two hours of tense talks that began at
   11 a.m. PDT, Adobe and EFF negotiators struck a deal: Adobe would
   agree to recommend Sklyarov's release.

   [...]

   But what happens next is unclear -- and victory celebrations may be
   premature.

   Since this is a criminal matter and not a civil suit, Adobe's abrupt
   reversal doesn't automatically get Sklyarov out of jail. That requires
   the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco, which filed charges
   against Sklyarov earlier this month, to abandon the prosecution.

   "The only thing I can tell you is that this is a criminal matter
   brought by the United States against the defendant, and Adobe is not a
   party to that action," says Matt Jacobs, an assistant U.S. attorney in
   the San Francisco office.

   "If they back off, it will not be because Adobe has changed its mind,"
   says Andrew Grosso, a former assistant U.S. attorney who's now a
   lawyer in private practice. "If they back off, it will be because
   politically the people in the U.S. Attorney's office who are handling
   this feel they are unacceptably exposed and therefore have decided not
   to go forward."

   Grosso is active in the Association for Computing Machinery and has
   criticized the DMCA. But he admits that federal prosecutors like to be
   the first to try cases under new laws, and proudly says that he was
   the first prosecutor to use money laundering laws to gain a conviction
   in a white-collar case.

   [...]


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Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 08:38:55 -0600 (MDT)
From: security curmudgeon <jericho () attrition org>
Subject: Unethical defacement of "ethics.org"

On July 20, 2001, a (presumably) Russian defacer known as 'RyDen'
compromised the machine hosting "ethics.org", the "Ethics Resource
Center".

Given the unethical nature of defacing web pages, the act alone had a bit
of irony to it. More interesting this time was the content of the
defacement. Instead of the usual crap seen from most defacers, RyDen chose
to replace their page with a "Free Dmitry" message, in reference to the
recently jailed software programmer Dmitry Sklyarov, who was detained
shortly before returning home after attending Defcon (www.defcon.org).
More ironic is the ethical considerations of the set of events surrounding
Sklyarov, Adobe and the FBI.

Russian Adobe Hacker Busted
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,45298,00.html

FBI becomes Copyright '911'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/20548.html

This defacement was part of a 'mass hack' in which RyDen defaced 18
domains. A copy of the defacement can be seen courtesy of the SafeMode
mirror:

http://www.safemode.org/mirror/2001/07/20/www.patientcard.net/




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