Mr. Parson, a Republican, said that it was “unlawful to access encoded data and systems in order to examine other people’s personal information.”
He cited a state law that said a hacker was anyone who gained unauthorized access to information or content. He said the reporter had no authorization to “convert or decode” the information on the website.
“This was clearly a hack,” Mr. Parson said, adding that the state would investigate the flaws that were uncovered in the system.
Legal observers said they were perplexed by Mr. Parson’s interpretation of what constituted a hack.
Frank Bowman, a professor of law at the University of Missouri School of Law, said that it was difficult to imagine the prosecution of a reporter who alerted state officials to information he discovered by examining a publicly available website.
The chances of prosecutors going after Mr. Renaud, the reporter, “are between zero and zero,” Professor Bowman said. “They’re not going to embarrass themselves like this.”
Tony Lovasco, a Republican state representative with a professional background in computers, said the governor’s announcement showed “a fundamental misunderstanding of both web technology and industry standard procedures for reporting security vulnerabilities.”
“Journalists responsibly sounding an alarm on data privacy is not criminal hacking,” he said on Twitter.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/us/missouri-st-louis-post-teachers-hack.html
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.