A Montreal school is being widely criticized for expelling a student who hacked into its computer system and helped expose flaws in the system’s security. The student now has been offered jobs by computer security companies, including the one that ran the system he hacked into. In the Internet age, the hacker is celebrated as a hero and the school is pilloried for being an overbearing, defensive holdover from a bygone age. It’s an unfair presumption that needs to be corrected.

... Mr. Al-Khabaz then went on and carried out what the company considered to be a “cyber-attack” on the school’s production servers. The company notified the school, and Mr. Al-Khabaz was hauled on the carpet. The company accepted the student’s explanation and noted that he “demonstrated great talent in computer science.” They dropped the matter and offered Mr. Al-Khabaz a job, but Dawson’s administrators felt the student had gone too far and expelled him on the grounds he had violated the college’s code of conduct.

Dawson’s officials are right: Rules exist for a reason, and students cannot expect to break them without consequence. Why have them, otherwise?

Swartz, who had a history of depression, was facing a slew of charges for allegedly downloading publicly funded academic journals from a large database that charged a fee for access. His family and supporters blame overzealous prosecutors for his death; the prosecutors insist – again, quite rightly – that “stealing is stealing.”

In the age of the Internet, the massive downloading for free of music and movies and other copyrighted material has muddied the waters for many people.

They seem to have forgotten that privacy rights and copyright laws are among the foundations of our economy. These are things that are not to be shoved aside by the absolutism of Internet activism.

The facts: AT&T admitted, at trial, that they “published” this data. Their words. Public-facing, programmatic accesses of APIs happen upwards of a trillion times per day. Twitter broke 13 billion on their API ages ago. This is something that happens more than the entire population of Earth, daily. The government has no problem with this up until you transform the output into something offensive to important people. People with “disruptive” startups, this is your fair warning: They are coming for you next.

The other one of my prosecutors, Zach Intrater, said that a comment I made about Goatse Security, my information security working group, starting a certification process to declare systems “goatse tight” was evidence of my intent to personally profit. For those not in on the joke: Goatse is an Internet meme referencing a man holding open his anus very widely. The mind reels.

I can’t survive like this. I am happy to be hitting a prison cell soon. They ruined my business. The feds get approval of who I can work for or with: they rejected one company because the CEO had a social network profile with an occupation listed as “hacker.” They prohibit me from touching any computer that isn’t federally monitored. I do my best to slang Perl code on an Android device to comply with my bail conditions. It isn’t pretty.

“It was Edouard Taza, the president of Skytech. He said that this was the second time they had seen me in their logs, and what I was doing was a cyber attack. I apologized, repeatedly, and explained that I was one of the people who discovered the vulnerability earlier that week and was just testing to make sure it was fixed. He told me that I could go to jail for six to twelve months for what I had just done and if I didn’t agree to meet with him and sign a non-disclosure agreement he was going to call the RCMP and have me arrested. So I signed the agreement.”