FBI Screwed Up In Sending Subpoenas In Lamo Case

from the whoops dept

You would think that it would be a basic thing for the FBI to understand the laws of how to conduct an investigation, but in the case of Adrian Lamo the hacker they're trying to lock up for years, they immediately jumped to the "last resort" investigative technique of sending out subpoenas to reporters who have interviewed Lamo over the years. Those reporters were also told that they weren't allowed to talk about the subpoenas, but they are reporters, after all, so the story got out pretty quickly. The subsequent publicity got the Justice Department to step in and admit that the FBI screwed up and shouldn't have sent out the subpoenas so early on in the investigative process.
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  • identicon
    LittleW0lf, 6 Oct 2003 @ 7:12pm

    Rediculous math strikes again!

    $300,000 worth of charges for Lamo doing 3000 searches on Lexus-Nexus? I'd be interested in knowing what sort of searches can be done on Lexus-Nexus that cost $100 a pop? Don't they just have public records and news sources?

    Lexus-Nexus charges $250 per week to access their information. Multiply that by 12 (3 months) and you get $3000. Multiply that by 5 (the number of accounts Lamo supposidly had), and you get $15,000, not $300,000. Obviously they are using the same flawed calculator the RIAA uses.

    Next they will say Lamo cost $8,000,000 in damages? (Mitnick supposidly cost Sun $8 million in damages when he downloaded the source for Sun's Solaris operating system, which you can download or get via CD from sun for either $10, $50, or $650, depending on who you are and what you are going to use it for.)

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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