For the past three weeks, two former FBI officials—Andrew McCabe and James Comey—have received wall-to-wall media coverage and substantial monetary support from people across the United States in the form of donations and books sales following their feuds with President Trump. But it’s a third former FBI official, unknown to virtually anyone—Terry Albury—who faces actual jail time from the Trump Justice Department and is far more deserving of the support of journalists everywhere.
A few weeks ago, Albury, a former FBI special agent based out of Minnesota, became the second person the Trump administration—after Reality Winner—prosecuted for allegedly leaking documents to the media. Critically, one of the documents he is assumed to have leaked directly impacts journalists’ rights and press freedom.
Dear Canada: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime
Canadian authorities should drop charges against a 19-year-old Canadian accused of “unauthorized use of a computer service” for downloading thousands of public records hosted and available to all on a government website. The whole episode is an embarrassing overreach that chills the right of access to public records and threatens important security research.
At the heart of the incident, as reported by CBC news this week, is the Nova Scotian government’s embarrassment over its own failure to protect the sensitive data of 250 people who used the province’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to request their own government files. These documents were hosted on the government web server that also hosted public records containing no personal information. Every request hosted on the server contained very similar URLs, which differed only in a single document ID number at the end of the URL. The teenager took a known ID number, and then, by modifying the URL, retrieved and stored all of the FOIA documents available on the Nova Scotia FOIA website.