THis one has got me pretty freaked. The DMCA is broken
legislation to start with. But that isn't bad enough. Now we
nab foreign nationals for supposedly violating its very loosely
worded strictures. We grab them out of a conference and haul
them off to a foreign federal prison with no apparent access to
family, embassy or decent representation. In a couple of weeks
the victim will reappear in SF so the court can decide whether
he should have a public defender ?!
Is it just me or is this utter contemptible behavior on the part
of the US? Am I just paranoid or does this mean that I can be
nabbed at any time either in my own country or in some other
country that happens to have laws on its books I never had a say
in or agreed to in any way if I should attend any event in that
country?
Has it come to the point that laws can be declared and people
prosecuted without regard for nationality or what nation passed
the laws and with no guarantees at all of reasonable process or
room to address the merits of the case?
What can be done to stop this madness? No one is safe if this
is what the world has come to, and especially not if this is
what the US has come to.
- a smaller matter---
Adobe is also now on my boycott list. Does anyone know of a
good PDF reader on Windoze? I don't want to see their company
logo for a good long while on any machine I am on. On Gnu/Linux
I use xpdf. But it seems a bit of overkill to run an X server
on windoze just to view pdf files at work.
- samantha
Declan McCullagh wrote:
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> -----
>
> From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
> Subject: FC: Russian hacker nabbed by FBI now lost in federal prison system
> To: politech@politechbot.com
> Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 21:25:30 -0400
> X-URL: http://www.mccullagh.org/
> X-URL: Politech is at http://www.politechbot.com/
> User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.2i
>
> http://www.cluebot.com/article.pl?sid=01/07/19/2332232
>
> Russian Hacker Arrested by FBI Goes Missing
> posted by declan on Thursday July 19, @06:12PM
> from the where-is-dmitry-sklyarov dept.
>
> ---
>
> Dmitry Sklyarov is missing.
>
> The 27-year old Russian programmer and hacker who was arrested after
> Defcon was last spotted at 3 pm Monday, when he made a brief court
> appearance in Las Vegas. He's charged with violating the 1998 Digital
> Millennium Copyright Act.
>
> Now he's adrift inside the federal prison bureaucracy. A managing
> director of ElcomSoft, Sklyarov's employer, says he has no idea where
> his colleague is. Says ElcomSoft's Vladimir Katalov: "Of course they
> really worry about him, because FBI/police didn't allow Dmit to talk
> to his family."
>
> An informed source in the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco said
> that after Sklyarov's court visit on Monday he was turned over to the
> U.S. Marshals. The source said Sklyarov is likely out of contact since
> he's in transit to California. Typically prisoners are moved to a
> holding facility in Oklahoma until there's a scheduled transport to
> San Francisco, much as FedEx routes packages through central hubs.
>
> The government source said prosecutors receive almost no warning from
> the marshals when prisoners will appear -- sometimes they get a phone
> call, and sometimes the marshals simply take the prisoner to the court
> with no notice.
>
> The U.S. Marshals did not return phone calls. The U.S. Attorney's
> offices in San Francisco and Las Vegas said they did not know where
> Sklyarov was.
<
<snipped...>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:39:50 MDT