zakur
24th January 2004, 08:45 AM
Senate GOP staff spied on Democrats' memos (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/157620_hack22.html)Republican staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Boston Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a Web site in November.
With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers and one server from the office of the Senate majority leader.
But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staff members and others familiar with the investigation say.GOP downplays reading of memos (http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/23/gop_downplays_reading_of_memos/)The Committee for Justice, headed by C. Boyden Gray, a former senior White House counsel during the first Bush administration, this week began circulating a "fact sheet" arguing that no rules or laws were broken by Republican staffers who exploited a computer glitch on a shared server that allowed them to access memos written by their Democratic counterparts without having to enter a password.
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The argument advanced by the Committee for Justice is that the behavior did not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, which makes it a criminal act to exceed one's authorization to access a government computer. It said staffers "were entitled to access their own desktop computers and committee network on which the documents were inadvertently disclosed" by the mistake of a Democratic technician.
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The group also emphasizes a new assertion that a Democratic technician was told about the problem in mid-2002 but failed to repair it. Democrats say they were never informed. Under certain legal ethics guidelines, a lawyer who inadvertently receives confidential materials must inform the other side.
The Committee for Justice also argues that there is no expectation of privacy for materials stored on a government server because "such documents are automatically stored on tapes and archived in a federal facility" and "staff was advised to keep documents they wanted to better secure on their hard drive."
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a Web site in November.
With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers and one server from the office of the Senate majority leader.
But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staff members and others familiar with the investigation say.GOP downplays reading of memos (http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/23/gop_downplays_reading_of_memos/)The Committee for Justice, headed by C. Boyden Gray, a former senior White House counsel during the first Bush administration, this week began circulating a "fact sheet" arguing that no rules or laws were broken by Republican staffers who exploited a computer glitch on a shared server that allowed them to access memos written by their Democratic counterparts without having to enter a password.
[...]
The argument advanced by the Committee for Justice is that the behavior did not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, which makes it a criminal act to exceed one's authorization to access a government computer. It said staffers "were entitled to access their own desktop computers and committee network on which the documents were inadvertently disclosed" by the mistake of a Democratic technician.
[...]
The group also emphasizes a new assertion that a Democratic technician was told about the problem in mid-2002 but failed to repair it. Democrats say they were never informed. Under certain legal ethics guidelines, a lawyer who inadvertently receives confidential materials must inform the other side.
The Committee for Justice also argues that there is no expectation of privacy for materials stored on a government server because "such documents are automatically stored on tapes and archived in a federal facility" and "staff was advised to keep documents they wanted to better secure on their hard drive."