The key bit is
> The raid by four Metropolitan Police constables took place after Southwark campaigner Robert Hutchinson was reportedly accused of illegally entering a password-protected area of a website.
> "I was searching in Google and found links to board meeting minutes," he told The Register. "Board reports, none of which were marked confidential. So I have no question that it was in the public domain."
So they're name dropping Google in the title for clickbait when the core issue is that the website didn't properly protect its data.
No, Hutchinson found the documents by searching on Google for the meeting minutes. The website might have protected the place where you found the link to the meeting minutes, but the meeting minutes themselves were hosted in a directory that not only was publicly accessible if you had the URL, but also allowed Google's crawler to access it and store it.
There is a slippery slope here, either way (if he gets free or if he gets sentenced), but none the less, Google is relevant to the case.
He was taken into custody and later released under investigation. Following a review of all available evidence, it was determined no offences had been committed and no further action was taken
So they already dropped it.
Edit: Whoops, all of my assumptions were wrong!
They're denying a tautology! A document is not password protected if you can access it without a password. A person not in a vehicle cannot commit a moving traffic violation. However, the automated computer system which issues those tickets does not actually comprehend those concepts, or any concepts at all. It merely follows rigid rules to send an alert on access to a particular file, or to issue a ticket with to the owner of the license plate number identified by the camera when a speed sensor returns a value not less than the speed limit (eg. NaN).
But who is the "they" who are denying those tautologies? As we abstract more and more to automated systems, it's important to remember that these systems are as dumb as a brick. A brick connected to the Internet and with very complicated melted sand inside, but a brick nonetheless. When decisions recommended by these bricks have significant consequences, it's important to keep a human in the loop.
It seems that the bigger issue is that the activist was arrested by the police on supposedly only IP address evidence presented by the company/society.
Somehow the IP had to be linked to the person, probably a warrant should be needed for that too.
> A man who viewed documents online for a controversial London property development and *shared them on social media* was raided by police after developers claimed there had been a break-in to their systems.
A possibly more accurate title would be: "Activist raided by London police after downloading docs found on Google Search"
The core issue is the government raided someones house for doing nothing wrong.
We're talking about The Register here. Clickbait is foundational to their business model.
1. Guy downloads stuff from website 2. Guy publishes stuff from website 3. Stuff becomes unavailable on the website 4. Website owners go to police, report “illegal access” 5. Police arrest guy
Either the police arrested him, and the company declined to inform the police that these illegally accessed files has been free to access, thus actively misleading the police, or company did inform the police and the police acted heinously by arresting him anyways. Maybe there’s a third option here that I’m not seeing. Seems pretty wild, and likely to me that the org should be criminally liable here (not that I know the laws or if they would be criminally liable.)
>> "He was taken into custody and later released under investigation. Following a review of all available evidence, it was determined no offences had been committed and no further action was taken."
Sounds like the first one
I don't think we have enough information.
Actually, one could argue the police are more likely to respond with greater exuberance when responding to a reported hostage situation in a mansion vs. trap house.
He found URLs that were not 'supposed' to be exposed, which apparently constitutes unauthorized access... You know like typing in a URL to the browser instead of clicking a link.
I mean: I believe that if he knew the material he accessed was behind a password wall, and that the search-result had pierced it, then he would be in violation of the CMA. That is: I think the Act doesn't require any kind of "breaking in" to create an offense; you just have to believe you're not supposed to be there.
IANAL.
""" None of the documents had any marking to suggest that they were confidential, nor were they protected by a password, he says.
He believed they were the type of material an organisation like Leathermarket CBS would and should publish.
...
Mr Hutchinson saw no issue downloading what he regarded as public documents, but the CBS disagrees. """
The accuser, because they were negligent in 1) securing their files; and 2) making allegations against the victim without appropriate confirmation.
The police, because they were negligent in that they did nothing to verify the allegation before taking some pretty drastic steps (arrest, device seizure) to the detriment of the victim.
However, I'm not aware of any success in this area before. It'd be new legal ground. I'd like to think that there should be some bar of reasonableness in the handling of a "computer crime" where anything below does qualify as negligence - along the same lines as unlawful arrest for any other reason. However I don't think the courts have ever considered such a case. It's impossible to make any claim as to whether compensation is due or not because there's never been an appropriate test case that can be referred to.
If you called up the police, any police anywhere, right now and said "Officer arrest this man, he downloaded a pdf from my server and I have the log.txt file to prove it!", I would honestly be willing to wager the deed to my house that the police would not be banging my door at sunrise to forcibly take me away and interrogate me.
At best it was gross incompetence, at worst abuse of power.
