Massive Passport Canada data leak
The Passport Canada website has a grave security flaw that allows easy access to the personal information (birth certificate, driver's license, dates of birth, social insurance numbers) of passport applicants.
Link (Thanks, Glyn!)
The breach was discovered last week by an Ontario man completing his own passport application. He found he could easily view the applications of others by altering one character in the Internet address displayed by his Web browser."I was expecting the site to tell me that I couldn't do that," said Jamie Laning of Huntsville. "I'm just curious about these things so I tried it, and boom, there was somebody else's name and somebody else's data."
the latest
latest episodes
Is mr Laning now in jail? A couple of years ago, there was a ruling about a guy who "hacked" into someones website by changing url parameters. This was considered cracking and a criminal offense... Can't remember the details.
I'm guessing that the case precedent you're thinking of was in the states. Canada is a little more intuitive with Internet laws.
Canada is too civilized to jail this guy for "hacking".
I'll bet his passport application will be rejected though.
Naw, it won't be rejected, it will be disappeared. Then they will mail it to the wrong address, and deny ever having recieved it. When he fills out another application, they will refuse to issue him a passport because there is already one in circulation (which they sent to the wrong address).
That's what they do to people who don't discover massive errors on their part, I can only imagine what levels of Kafkaesque absurdity they will do with someone who actually embarrasses them in advance.