[ptwiggens]

"a number civil rights in Australia automatically disappear if you were in the midst of committing a crime while trying to claim them."

That doesn't make sense to me. You haven't "committed a crime" until you've been convicted.

You seem to be saying that you lose the rights merely by being suspected of a crime.

If that is the case, those rights don't actually exist in the first place.

In the US, they have successfully prosecuted people for "fiddling" just like the FBI did here.

[XorNot]

If you've been charged with a criminal crime, you can't press a civil suit against the victim, essentially.

The point here is somewhat similar: trying to sue the FBI for unauthorized access to a server would hinge on the relative standing of that law compared to much more serious offences (i.e. conspiracy to murder being the big one) - since the case would have to come from DPR against the FBI, and would thus be subject I suspect to similar tests of standing.

Other people have made the wider point more thoroughly as well - you'd really struggle to prove wrongdoing when all that was acquired was an IP address.

[fleitz]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States

[tedunangst]

Example of somebody prosecuted strictly for fiddling?

To answer my own question, I guess you could say weev, but I think his troubles really began when he made the pivot from fiddling to mass scraping. I think it's harder to argue the FBI's access was unauthorized when what they were looking at was the "access is denied" page.