Police continuing investigation of alleged data breach
Halifax police say they will likely have “more to say” about a case involving a 19-year-old man who has denied he had malicious intent when he downloaded files from a government website.
Last Wednesday, Supt. Jim Perrin said the young man was arrested during a search and given a notice to appear in court on June 12, with police intending to lay criminal charges of unauthorized use of a computer.
Police alleged the teenager was involved in a “data breach” of the government’s freedom of information portal.
In a news conference Wednesday, Perrin said police have yet to provide a sworn information to provincial court and also said, “when the investigation is concluded we’ll probably have more to say about it.”
“We’re not finished collecting the evidence in this particular case,” he said on Wednesday.
Last week, Perrin had said that his investigators would “forensically examine” computers and software that were seized in the April 11 search of the Halifax residence where the 19-year-old and his family live.
Since the search, the young man and his family have told the CBC he thought he was accessing public files from the freedomof-information portal, and had no intent to take personal information. The teenager told the broadcaster he was looking for information from public documents about a teachers’ labour dispute last year.
He said he wrote a few simple lines of code to download files,
rather than transferring them one by one.
Experts on cyber law have said if the teenager’s account is correct, the arrests and the family’s allegations that 15 officers descended on their home and left it in disarray may be a case of police “overreach,” when the real issue is a lack of basic security on the site for private files.
Perrin said police don’t intend to enter an argument over the quality or merits of their investigation.
“The police aren’t going to get into a public dispute over what a suspect in an incident has to say. Obviously there has been a lot of opinion on social media and other news sources,” he said.
Perrin was asked whether it was correct, as the family has said, that 15 officers were involved in the search, and whether police had first done research to
determine they were raiding a family residence.
“We wouldn’t confirm our deployment numbers,” he said.
“What I can tell you is that every search we do, there is risk analysis done around that. That could be for scene security, transporting of suspects, physical searches, subject matter experts with respect to digital evidence.”
“There are a number of officers that have to go to any search.”
The superintendent has already stated that it’s rare for police to make an arrest under section 341.1 of the criminal code, which prohibits unauthorized uses of computers “with intent to commit an offence.”
“It may be the first time that we’ve investigated an offence that met this particular section. Cyber crime is not new but ... we haven’t had a lot of similar type investigations.”