[sjansen]

Unfortunately that's not necessarily true. There are plenty of examples of prosecutorial over reach and unfair sentencing because our laws were written by people who fundamentally don't understand technology. It will probably take a few generations to fix that.

Common sense won out in the case, but it certainly helped that the target was a reporter instead of a security researcher or ordinary citizen.

[teddyh]

> people who fundamentally don't understand technology. It will probably take a few generations to fix that.

No, it won’t be fixed. You seem to imply that people are actually deciding things based on their understanding of the facts. I don’t think so.

I think that people in these positions don’t care if they understand technology or not. They care about how they will look. If they can get away with pleasing their confederates by pretending they don’t understand technology, they will do so. If they could please them by pretending to understand technology and do the truthful thing, they would do that. They might (or might not) actually understand technology, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with what they will actually do. They will do the most profitable thing they can plausibly get away with. In a few generations, as you say, people might have less room to blatantly pretend they don’t understand a certain level of technology, but I have a feeling that techology itself will have become proportionally more complex, too, so nothing will change in practice.

[night862]

No, I think GP is correct in saying that the case would be laughed out of court. Persuing this case would have been a gift to the Post-Dispatch and Ian would have been a hero.

Not only is this whole thing over literally right-clicking html, but this is a Reporter working for a local newspaper.

Imagine for a moment that this story was about a regular person who is not employed as reporter with credentials and a portfolio. Depending on that individuals circumstances, it could easily be a life-ruiner. I could think of a few people.

[TigeriusKirk]

My impression from previously looking into this case is that there probably was a violation of the law here, but that it would be absurd to prosecute it.

The mistake here would be to assume that officials always correctly avoid absurd prosecutions.

[Clubber]

What law specifically?

[Someone1234]

> there probably was a violation of the law here

He assessed a public web-page, found base64 encoded content, and decoded it. Please explain in exacting detail what you're claiming here both in terms of facts AND law.