[wordup] russian hacker arrestted at defcon

[Adam Shand]

having just come back from defcon where i was speaking about wireless
security and community networks, this possibly hits closer to home for me
then is needed.

still, i think the dcma is evil and needs to be overturned.  now.

Submitted by: mikem at alaska.net
URL: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,45298,00.html

Russian Adobe Hacker Busted
By Declan McCullagh
7:04 a.m. July 17, 2001 PDT

LAS VEGAS -- FBI agents have arrested a Russian programmer for giving away
software that removes the restrictions on encrypted Adobe Acrobat files.

Dmitry Sklyarov, a lead programmer for Russian software company ElcomSoft,
was visiting the United States for the annual Defcon hacker convention,
where he gave a talk on the often-flawed security of e-books.

This would be the second known prosecution under the criminal sections of
the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, (DMCA) which took
effect last year and makes it a crime to "manufacture" products that
circumvent copy protection safeguards.

Vladimir Katalov, Elcom's managing director, told PlanetEbook that
Skylarov was arrested for distributing the company's Advanced eBook
Processor as he was on his way home and that he is being held in a Las
Vegas jail while awaiting transfer to California.

This is the latest round in an increasingly nasty battle between Elcomsoft
and Adobe, which fired off a stiff letter to the Russian firm a few weeks
ago claiming "unauthorized activity relating to copyrighted materials,"
and requesting that the $100 eBook decoder be taken off the market.

At the time, Katalov replied on the comp.text.pdf newsgroup by dismissing
Adobe's complaints as specious: "We'll just move our site to another ISP,
in another country (where there is no Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
And/or make our software available for free, under the GNU license."

So far, hackers and open-source advocates have paid the most attention to
the DMCA's civil portions, which eight movie studios used in an attempt to
compel 2600 Magazine to remove a DVD-descrambling program from their
website.

The recording industry threatened Ed Felten, a Princeton University
computer science professor, with a civil suit under the DMCA if he
presented his research on copy protection plans, prompting the Electronic
Frontier Foundation to file a lawsuit trying to declare the DMCA
unconstitutional on free-speech grounds.

Federal prosecutors in Florida have filed one case against a man who
allegedly distributed cards that circumvent satellite content protection
systems. Dario Diaz, the defense attorney involved in the case, said in an
interview last week that he did not know of any other DMCA prosecutions.

Sklyarov, who works in Moscow, was arrested at the Las Vegas airport on
Monday morning, according to his employer.

During its exchanges with Adobe, Elcomsoft has taken the position -- with
which many security experts agree -- that any kind of eBook protection
system running on insecure hardware, including Acrobat PDF, is inherently
insecure.

"We would like to state our intention to publish the sources of our
software in the Internet, and do our best to make them available to
everyone all over the world if Adobe Systems continues to pursue us,"
Elcomsoft says on its website.

An e-mail message dated June 25 from Adobe's anti-piracy team to Elcomsoft
says: "Offering of this product without Adobe's consent constitutes
contributory copyright infringement....  This violation is a matter of
great concern and will be pursued aggressively by Adobe Systems."

Adobe also pressured Elcomsoft's former Internet provider, Verio, to pull
the plug on the company's website. Elcomsoft has since moved its online
operations to a Russian provider.

An earlier version of Elcomsoft's decoder appears to have caused
BarnesandNoble.com to temporarily yank some eBooks from its online store
last month. Adobe quickly released an improved encoder, sparking a kind of
virtual arms race between the two firms.

Since the U.S. is alone in having a law as broad as the DMCA -- though
Europe is weighing a similar scheme -- the threat of criminal prosecution
could prompt overseas security researchers to boycott American firms.

After Felten, the Princeton professor, initially bowed to threats from the
recording industry and did not present his paper at a conference in
Pittsburgh in April, organizers predicted an American boycott could
happen.

Ross Anderson, a reader in security engineering at Cambridge University,
said at the time: "There is a question whether it will be prudent to hold
certain types of security conferences in the U.S. in the future.... We
can't really tolerate a situation where anyone who breaks a system that
embarrasses someone gets served with a writ."