Cyber law risks making the 'ordinary' criminal: expert

Source: smh.com.au

A senior lecturer in internet law says the arrest of a Fairfax journalist over his receipt of an unauthorised Facebook photo "defies sensible explanation" and the entire matter exposes serious failings in Australian cyber crime laws.

Peter Black, senior lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, said Australian laws on cyber crime were so broad that they criminalised much "ordinary activity". He said it was very unusual for police to spring into action over an alleged theft of digital photos.

Fairfax deputy technology editor Ben Grubb was arrested by Queensland Police yesterday and threatened with charges relating to the receipt of "tainted material". The material pertained to a story Grubb published yesterday revealing that a security researcher managed to bypass Facebook's privacy settings to access someone's private photos.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/

would they file charges against anyone who saw it?

to give a site time to correct a security flaw before publishing it. So no tears for him from me.

Authoritarians are the same everywhere..

He reported a critical Facebook security issue and somehow this makes him a target of the police?

How come they didn't question the guy that actually did the hacking?
It sounds like intimidation of the press to me.
I see that Australia has drunk from the corporate koolaid just like the US.

They can annoy a few people at great expense, but they cannot arrest and penalize everyone for doing what is done millions of times a day,

usually make an example out of the prosecutor.

is for everyone to always be breaking the law. So if you become a nuisance to the rich or powerful you can be quickly arrested and locked up.