Is Distributed Computing a Crime?
From http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300:
A computer network administrator faces multiple felony charges and years in a Georgia prison for allegedly installing Distributed.net clients without permission. Prosecutors say its justice, others aren't so sure
By Ann Harrison
Dec 20 2001 12:44AM PT
A college computer technician who offered his school's unused computer processing power for an encryption research project will be tried next month in Georgia for computer theft and trespassing charges that carry a potential total of 120 years in jail.
The closely-watched case if one of the first in which state prosecutors have lodged felony charges for allegedly downloading third-party software without permission.
David McOwen was working as a PC specialist at the state-run DeKalb Technical Institute in 1998, when he learned about a project by the non-profit organization distributed.net that allowed computer users to donate their unused processing power to test the RC5 encryption algorithm. Noticing that many of the machines he maintained on the seven DeKalb campuses sat idle for long periods, McOwen installed distributed.net clients at several of those locations while performing a Y2K upgrade on the machines in 1999.
According to McOwen, during the Christmas holidays in 1999 school administrators noticed that unused machines were sending and receiving the distributed.net data -- about the equivalent of one email a day. The school sent McOwen a letter of suspension in January of 2000, without specifying a grievance, and McOwen resigned shortly afterwards, believing that he had put the incident behind him.
Instead, in June of 2001 McOwen was contacted by an investigator from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation who informed him that he was the subject of an 18-month computer crime investigation. In October, prosecutors from the Georgia state attorney general's office charged McOwen with eight violations of Georgia's tough computer crime law: one count of computer theft, and seven counts of computer trespass -- one for each of the school offices where McOwen downloaded the distributed.net client.
Read more at the site above...
Anyways, I'd like to know what you guys think. Given that there's a reward involved, do you think he committed a crime, and why?