Judge accuses hacks of hacking cannibal ruling

Okay, so the ruling is now public knowledge...

Will she change her mind just because of that, or what?

I find the lack of judges in this country who barely (or in some cases don't) even know what the internet is or how to protect their computers staggering.

In other news...

... a Judge in another municipality wrote a secret ruling on a postcard and mailed it to himself. He's now claiming that someone must have reached into his mail slot, taken the postcard, copied it, and put it back where it was. That's the most likely explanation for how it ended up in the hands of a local news station.

Idiot

Does she truly believe this? Or is she trying to gain publicity by making noise on computer misuse, in the hope that a US leadership change will prompt a series of promotions and legal shake ups?

Or, which is more likely, she has no idea on what is going on and either mailed it to the wrong address (spelling mistake?) first before fixing and resending to herself or something just as stupid.

Her own fault?

You must be joking.

It is not her own fault. She used non secure methods, but in no way that is her fault.

If a have a thin door, is it my fault if some "nice" people break into my house, beat and rob me? NO. It is THEIR fault.

It might have been her fault to some extent

But that doesn't mean anyone should be able to steal a report they have no right to see.

Better analogy...

"If a have a thin door, is it my fault if some "nice" people break into my house, beat and rob me? NO. It is THEIR fault."

If you have no curtains in your house, and somebody walks past and sees something you don't want them to, is it your fault? Well... yes.

If she'd shut the curtains, and the leak had still happened (very likely) then at least she could know it wasn't because she'd negligently left her curtains open...

Backward judiciary

This isn't the first time that judges in the US* have shown themselves to complete morons when it comes to that there newfangeld technotrickery.

From the judge who decreed that wikileaks should be banned/ brought down/ never present again on the interweb, to the Californian judge who didn't understand how a fixed-wheel bicycle works. Utter morons.

* - that's not to say that judges over here are any better, just that I haven't read any stories that have really stuck in my mind about them.

Re: Her own fault?

Well there have been metric shedloads of caselaw that says that emails are NOT confidential.

Shit, she's a judge! She should know that!

So if it's OK by the judicial system for my email to be scanned and intercepted because it's plaintext, the judicial system sending plaintext emails can't really complain about people reading it.

metric shedloads

hmm, I'm now curious as to what an imperial shedload is?

elreg, please update your standards of measurement to include these

Why go public?

If you were a judge who honestly suspected that your email was compromised, wouldn't you call in professional investigators (FBI?) rather than make public statements of your suspicions?

FFS, if you suspected any hacking, you'd want to know ASAP where it was happening, since it could be on your work PC and nothing to do with email at all.

@Aitor

Your insurers may have something to say about that. You might not have done the stealing, but your negligence allowed it to happen. By using an insecure communications method, she was negligent.

If she hasn't broken any laws or codes of conduct by doing this sort of thing, then the system is at fault because this sort of silliness should be thoroughly discouraged.

See also: the organisations which lose 20 million customer records by leaving a laptop lying around. It wasn't the laptop user's fault that it wasn't where they'd left it, surely? It's not their fault they weren't more careful, right?

Her own fault??!

I'm sure we're all aware that email is insecure, but do you seriously believe that journalists were packet-sniffing her office's LAN? Maybe they broke into AT&T and sniffed it in transit? Maybe they hacked into Hotmail and stole it from there.

Or maybe, just maybe, it got leaked by an insider.

@Aitor

If you're going to rely on the goodness of others for your own protection, why even bother having a door in the first place? Just because it's illegal to break in to a house and steal the owner's stuff doesn't prevent people from doing it-- they're criminals, that's what they do for their daily bread.

A much better solution would be to have a door so intensely hard to penetrate that the average opportunist will ignore it in favor of easier pickings.

@ Karl

An imperial shed is an old converted anderson shelter with potting shed appendix.

Re: metric shedloads

The metric shedload is slightly less than the metric shitload (because the shed container has been cleaned...).

The shitload is based off a number of buttloads (imperial or metric).

The metric buttload is slightly smaller than the UK imperial buttload which is itself smaller than the US imperial buttload.

Of course, the actual size of the buttload and how many buttloads go in to a shitload (and how much of that needs to be cleaned up when you make it a shedload) is, of course, undefined.

I, for one, do not wish to investigate metrology in this case...

(this complete lack of information bulletin is brought to you by the Office of National Statistics and the number eft)

If she admits she is to blame...

does that mean she will find herself in contempt of court???

The fact that she was STUPID enough to email something like that to her home computer should be an automatic disbarment for her.

Idiot.

they never listen

management drones, political hacks, they NEVER listen to their IT guys. We tell them over and over that there's a REASON not to send stuff to machines we don't control. We tell them that's why there are regulations specifically prohibiting the use of "free" emails, and why it's practically ILLEGAL to send stuff to unsecured, non-county/city/state machines.

But noooo, they know oh so much more than us IT morlocks..they're Beautiful Smart People, good Democrats and Union people. They of the unscented feces. They put stuff on PDAs, bypass firewalls, load up on free USB sticks, burn stuff to discs and copy to local files, bring home laptops, and sneak in rules to auto-forward confidential and classified emails to their Gmail and Yahoo accounts.

And time and time again this sort of thing happens. And some poor IT drone gets the sack. Because even if he documents the decision, covers his @rse with a paper trail, he still gets it. Because the Union guys won't support you since they're protecting their own, ditto for Upper Management, and the same for local politicoes who prefer media silence. Attorneys won't touch it since there's not enough money to be made. And if the IT guy manages to not get fired for whistleblowing, his whole department gets budget cuts, the guy will never see a promotion-he's not a "team player"...

And no, this ain't some Bush Administration organization I'm referring to either. Rather a very large, very liberal, mostly Democrat, oppressively "PC" county government agency. Makes the Pentagon seem like a college coed dorm in comparison.