I see your point. But at the same time I see the government's point: if you discover something like that you should notify the authorities (not via mass media) instead of downloading everything.

I will give the kid that he might have thought they were legally publicly available, but I am unsure about how strong this excuse is...

Screw the government, sue the government. Damn pigs can't even own up to their own stupidity.

@Eibe They were public documents, why would he know some were confidential its not as if he would assume the government would be so incompetent right? Seriously the burden falls on the government to not put sensitive data in public databases, if its not suppose to be public then don't release it as such.

@AresKrieger I misread the article. I thought he was accessing a single document that he was authorised to see and managed to find a loophole to download everything. Not that most of the stuff was public and there was some cofidential data. My bad. 

@Eibe the website he was accessing was the FOIA publicly released documents, from what we know right now is that some documents weren't supposed to be publicly available. That isn't the citizen's fault but rather the people in charge of that website.

Sadly enough I've been the witness of data leaks, both personal data and corporate sensitive documents, and the person responsible for it was never held accountable and the system wasn't properly fixed, instead some Band-Aid was applied and a new leak/breach is simply waiting to happen.

What I imagine happened ;

"Bob, seriously?!?! Again!?!?!?"

"It's ok, we got your back Bob, we'll say the kid hacked us!"

"Now let's go fuck this kid up!!"

Murica! 

Nova Scotia!

It would be most logical to try to fix the problem, and mitigate the damage.

@Cinnabar Sonar they fixed the problem : the website was shut down.

as for damage control, they arrested the guy and his whole family.

All in all, I'd say that was a job well done!!!

... /s ...if it wasn't obvious

hey, someone mad a thread about this! lol

Quote

as for damage control, they arrested the guy and his whole family.

While I know you're being sarcastic, but there is a big difference between damage control, and a scapegoat.