<a href="https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/10/police_raid_man_for_downloading_google_search_docs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/10/police_raid_man_for_d...</a> is a better article with pictures.<p>The key bit is<p>> The raid by four Metropolitan Police constables took place after Southwark campaigner Robert Hutchinson was reportedly accused of illegally entering a password-protected area of a website.<p>> "I was searching in Google and found links to board meeting minutes," he told The Register. "Board reports, none of which were marked confidential. So I have no question that it was in the public domain."<p>So they're name dropping Google in the title for clickbait when the core issue is that the website didn't properly protect its data.
This article leaves some really crucial parts of this timeline ambiguous. These things happened in some order:<p>1. Guy downloads stuff from website
2. Guy publishes stuff from website
3. Stuff becomes unavailable on the website
4. Website owners go to police, report “illegal access”
5. Police arrest guy<p>Either the police arrested him, and the company declined to inform the police that these illegally accessed files has been free to access, thus actively misleading the police, or company did inform the police and the police acted heinously by arresting him anyways. Maybe there’s a third option here that I’m not seeing. Seems pretty wild, and likely to me that the org should be criminally liable here (not that I know the laws or if they would be criminally liable.)
This is why people say that the police are an agent of the wealthy to oppress the common people. The wealthy "file a report", and the police "take the report seriously", trampling the rights and stealing precious time of people's lives (and sometimes much worse), but the common people can not do the same to their oppressors.
If they checked, who did access the files, don't the police should have seen, there was no password protection? Very strange. And the police nedded al his devices for 4 weeks to check that ..
You're thinking it's ridiculous, but this is exactly what happened to Weev.<p>He found URLs that were not 'supposed' to be exposed, which apparently constitutes unauthorized access... You know like typing in a URL to the browser instead of clicking a link.
El Reg doesn't say in so many words that Hutchinson didn't know he was in a password-protected area (sorry, double-negative).<p>I mean: I believe that if he knew the material he accessed was behind a password wall, and that the search-result had pierced it, then he would be in violation of the CMA. That is: I think the Act doesn't require any kind of "breaking in" to create an offense; you just have to believe you're not supposed to be there.<p>IANAL.