Hacker Arrest Stirs Protest

Thu Jul 19 08:06:30 EDT 2001

One last bit of TTTH, for those, under rocks, who didn't know the story by
now...

Cheers,
RAH

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,45342,00.html

	Hacker Arrest Stirs Protest
By Declan McCullagh

2:00 a.m. July 19, 2001 PDT

WASHINGTON -- When the FBI arrested a Russian programmer this week on
charges of criminal copyright violations, the government unwittingly
ignited a powder keg of outrage.

Web pages immediately sprouted to demand the release of Dmitry Sklyarov,
who was visiting the United States to describe his work at the Defcon
hacker convention in Las Vegas. Newly minted activists set up a mailing
list, launched a defense fund, and trashed Adobe Systems for urging the
U.S. government to arrest Sklyarov on charges of circumventing its copy
protection methods.

	See also:
Everybody's got issues in Politics

Dmitry Sklyarov, a lead programmer for Russian software company ElcomSoft,
was arrested Monday morning for distributing the company's Advanced eBook
Processor.

This high-visibility prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
seems to have focused the kind of anger not seen since the days of the 1996
Communications Decency Act or the Secret Service raid of Steve Jackson
Games -- two defining moments in the development of civil liberties online.

>From the federal government's point of view, it's merely enforcing a law
enacted by Congress in October 1998 that punishes anyone who distributes
"any technology, product, service, device, component or part" that, like
Sklyarov's software, bypasses copy-protection mechanisms. Sklyarov is
facing a five-year prison term and a fine of $500,000.

Matthew Parrella, a federal prosecutor in Las Vegas, said a judge on Monday
decided to hold Sklyarov without bail until his hearing in California some
time in the next two weeks. "The court deemed him a risk of non-appearance,
which is not uncommon with white collar criminals," Parrella said.

This is the latest round in an increasingly nasty battle between Russian
firm ElcomSoft and Adobe, which fired off a stiff letter a few weeks ago
claiming "unauthorized activity relating to copyrighted materials," and
requesting that the $100 e-book decoder be taken off the market.

Yet from a programmer's perspective, Sklyarov was simply following the
venerable hacker tradition of exposing weaknesses in a security system --
in this case the often-flawed security of e-books -- in a smart, clever
way. He received even higher points for documenting his research and
publishing a paper (PDF) at Defcon last weekend on behalf of ElcomSoft.

"The U.S. government for the first time is prosecuting a programmer for
building a tool that may be used for many purposes, including those that
legitimate purchasers need in order to exercise their fair use rights,"
said Robin Gross, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

What Gross calls "fair use rights" are part of modern copyright law. They
permit people to use copyrighted products legally in a certain way without
permission -- for instance, by excerpting a short portion of a work.

But what if the content is in a digital wrapper, such as the one used by
Adobe? What about fair use then?

With the exception of it being a criminal prosecution, Sklyarov's case is
remarkably similar to a civil lawsuit filed by eight movie studios against
2600 Magazine. They claim the underground hacker zine was distributing
DVD-descrambling software in violation of the DMCA, and urged the trial
judge to reconsider.

That didn't work, and 2600 is now waiting for a verdict from a federal
appeals court. (At the time the studios filed suit in January 2000, the
criminal portions of the DMCA had not taken effect. In October 2000, they
did.)

The cases are parallel because the DeCSS utility that 2600 distributed
allowed Linux users to watch a DVD on a machine for which it was not
authorized by the encryption designer. Similarly, Sklyarov's utility allows
Adobe Acrobat customers to read a file on computers for which it is not
authorized.

Rene Valladares, a federal public defender in Las Vegas, said he appeared
with Sklyarov around 3 p.m. in court Monday for an extradition and bail
hearing. He said that his client would be moved in the next two weeks to
the San Jose and San Francisco area where a judge would determine if he
needs a public defender.

In the meantime, pro-Sklyarov protests are underway.

In San Francisco on Wednesday evening, campaigners met at the home of one
outraged activist to plan strategy. Some cypherpunks have created
BoycottAdobe.com, which blames Adobe for "abusing U.S. copyright law to
protect their cash-flow," and others are hunting for San Francisco-area
natives who can vouch for Sklyarov's character -- so he can be released on
bail.

The danger for Adobe is that rather than dissipating, online anger could
instead focus on how the company likely lobbied the U.S. government to take
up its cause with regard to the ElcomSoft utility.

In an affadavit (PDF), FBI agent Daniel J. O'Connell tells of a series of
meetings with Adobe engineers and technicians in which the company provided
him with all the information he needed.

"We did bring the case to the attention of the FBI, but it was the U.S.
government that investigated and acted upon what was found," said Susan
Altman Prescott, marketing vice president at Adobe.

Prescott predicted this would be the first in a series of cases: "You will
see continued support of the U.S. government for enforcing such material
and you will see an ongoing effort to incorporate better technology into
products to make occurrences such as these few and far between."

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