What's so wrong about hacking an MPs website?


Kemi Badenoch MP
Kemi Badenoch, Conservative MP for Saffron Walden and, bizarrely for an MP with just a few months experience, Conservative Party vice-chairman with responsibility for selecting candidates in the 2022 election today confessed that ten-years ago she hacked into the website of a Labour MP to make changes to that MP’s website to “say nice things about Tories”.

This is a problem for two reasons so far as I can see.

First, we live in a climate where allegations of underhand and barely legal election tactics are thrown about regularly, apparently with some evidence to suggest that they are more than just allegations. Do we really want people in the House of Commons and at the top of the governing party who have confessed to engaging in completely illegal behaviour to influence voters?

Secondly, I mentioned that this sort of thing is illegal because it is a serious offence. It would appear likely that the MP whose website was hacked was Harriet Harman, then deputy leader of the ruling Labour Party. The BBC reported on the 25th April 2008 that her site had been hacked and altered to announce her defection to the Conservative Party. The hacker also used the opportunity to call on Labour voters to support Boris Johnson in the Mayoral election that was held a week later, on the 1st May 2008. I do not know whether that was the hack in question and so I shall not address that matter any further.

What I can say is that where somebody gains unauthorised secure access to any program or data and he or she knows that the access is unauthorised then an offence is committed under section 1 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990. The offence can be tried either at the magistrates’ court or in the Crown Court where the maximum penalty is two-years imprisonment.

Section 3 of the same Act creates a different offence for people who do any unauthorised act in relation to a computer, which the person knows to be unauthorised and by doing that act the person intends to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer or to impair the reliability of any such data. To my mind, that would seem to accurately describe the act of hacking into a website to change the data, which prevents or hinders access to the data by users and impairs the reliability of data obtained from the website. This offence can also be tried in either the magistrates court or Crown Court; however, the maximum penalty is ten-years imprisonment!

In R v Crosskey (Gareth) [2012] EWCA Crim 1645 the defendant was convicted of offences under both sections 1 and 3 of the Misuse of Computers Act 1990 after he managed to gain access to a Facebook account belonging to Selena Gomez for three days. Crosskey claimed throughout that he had taken control of the account to demonstrate Facebook’s weak security; however, he also made threats to disclose personal information from the account. On appeal. Crosskey’s sentence was reduced from 18 months to 8 months for the section 3 offence and 6 months was reduced to 4 months imprisonment for the section 1 offence.

The Court of Appeal held that 9-months imprisonment was the correct sentence for Victor Lindesay (R v Lindesay [2001] EWCA Crim 1720) who accessed three websites of a former employer to delete certain data with the aim of causing inconvenience.

Ms Badenoch made her confession after she was asked what the naughtiest thing she ever did was. With hindsight, maybe Theresa May’s approach of confessing to really innocuous and boring things like running through hayfields wasn’t a bad plan after all.
Location: Red Lion St, Richmond TW9 1RB, UK

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are items referred to in s.9’s as exhibits bound to be served?

  Background - CPS served a witness statement on me that exhibited two BWV clips that are potentially relevant to the Crown’s case and may have some relevance to the defence case insofar as they are likely to show the lighting and weather at the time events happened. Somebody has listed the clips as unused material rather than putting them in the exhibits folder that accompanies the served evidence. This raised an interesting (to me anyway) question about whether a party who exhibits an item in a statement is bound to serve it on their opponent. At court the judge took the view that the Crown were at liberty to classify items exhibited in s9s as unused material if they chose not to rely upon them in evidence. I took the view that if they are exhibited then they must be served along with the witness statement that exhibits the item and that the solution to a situation where the Crown say they are now unused is to edit the witness statement to remove the reference, by agreement with ...
More gibberish >>

Is there twice as much violent crime in the UK versus the USA?

Image
The tweet from Charlie Kirk I came across a screenshot of a Twitter post while on Facebook this morning. The original post now has 11,000 retweets and 23,000 likes on Twitter. As you can see from the picture somebody called Charlie Kirk, who is a right-wing American commentator, claims that there are 933 violent crimes in the UK per 100,000 people. This is more than double the rate he claims for the USA where he says there are only 399 violent crimes per 100,000 people. The UK doesn’t feel that violent to me, so is it true? We’re all gonna die According to the FBI, in 2016 there were 1,248,185 violent crimes committed across the whole of the USA. That is an increase of 4.1% on the 2015 figure but still represented only 386.3 violent crimes per 100,000 people . So, Mr Kirk appears to be slightly overestimating the violent crime in the USA. I should say that I am using the 2016 figures as those are the latest available on the FBI website, so maybe he has slightly differe...
More gibberish >>

Driving without insurance

Image
Insurance is a contract that remains in force until it expires or is cancelled As you may, or may not, know I specialise in motoring law and most of my work involves defending people accused of drink driving . With the drink driving often come other road traffic offences such as driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. It’s driving without insurance I want to talk about today because I think far too many police officers, solicitors, barristers and judges miss a key legal point when looking at these cases. I’ve received prosecution papers today for somebody accused of driving while disqualified and driving without insurance. The no insurance element is claim that the suspect did not tell the insurer about the disqualification. In his statement, the police officers says, “ [I] contacted [the insurer] who called me back informing me they would not consider the insurance policy valid as there were no convictions disclosed.” Looks like an open an...
More gibberish >>