North Dakota Judge Gets It Wrong...WAY wrong. This is just mind blowing.

Ever been prosecuted for tracking spam? Running a traceroute? Doing a zone transfer? Asking a public internet server for public information that it is configured to provide upon demand?

No? Well, David Ritz has. And amazingly, he lost the case.

Here are just a few of the gems that the court has the audacity to call ”conclusions of law.” Read them while you go donate to David’s legal defense fund. He got screwed here, folks, and needs your help.

“Ritz’s behavior in conducting a zone transfer was unauthorized within the meaning of the North Dakota Computer Crime Law.” You might not know what a zone transfer is, but I do. It’s asking a DNS server for all the particular public info it provides about a given domain. This is a common task performed by system administrators for many purposes. The judge is saying that DNS zone transfers are now illegal in North Dakota.

“The Court rejects the test for “authorization” articulated by defendant’s expert, Lawrence Baldwin. To find all access “authorized” which is successful would essentially turn the computer crime laws of this country upside down.” That’s untrue. The judge is trying to hang David out to dry, even when provided evidence of what actually constitutes hacking or cracking. Accessing a server on the public internet that is set up to provide that public info is not a crime, and saying that it is not a crime doesn’t suddenly damage computer crime law. The judge just amended the definition of “unauthorized” to include public internet servers that were expressly configured to provide info to anybody who asks for that info.