[thailandstartup]

>Justice Tennent jailed Monks for 18 months, with the last 12 months of the sentence suspended on condition she be of good behaviour for three years. >She was ordered to repay Aurora $193,187.43.

This is a horrendous miscarriage of justice. 4 months internet access = approx $80.

[demallien]

The judge was quite clear that the sentence wasn't about reparation, but about deterrence... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(legal)

[philk]

I'd rather someone was deterring Telstra from levying such exorbitant charges in the first place than wasting my tax dollars locking someone up for such a minor crime.

[geon]

Exactly.

Assuming she had downloads running non-stop during the 4 months, at a maximum of 7 mbps (3g), she would have downloaded 8859 GB. With a $193000 bill, the "significant theft" was Telestra charging $22 per GB.

[Natsu]

Someone else looked up Telstra pricing and got an estimate of 90GB.

http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/plans/phone_plan.html

They charge more like $2/MB. Sadly, Australia absolutely sucks in terms of internet access costs.

[caf]

I am sure the power company is far happier paying $22 per GB than $20 per month per meter.

[Padraig]

I'm getting very different numbers... I may be wrong though?

(7,000,000/8) = 875,000 bytes/s = 0.834 MB/s

0.834 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 72,057 MB/day

(EDIT: Tweaked numbers, had mistyped 0.834 as 0.844 — doesn't affect the point)

[russell_h]

Your number looks the same, 72GB/day = 8,859GB over 4 months.

[Padraig]

Right, sorry.

[tptacek]

I don't understand what's "minor" about this crime.

If theft of meter SIM cards became endemic, the utility and the MNO would have to spend millions or even tens of millions of dollars to deploy countermeasures. That spend is entirely deadweight loss that exists solely to mitigate bad actors.

Not subverting your power meter seems like a pretty reasonable clause in the social contract that enables us all to have (extraordinarily) cheap and convenient electrical power.

[iloveponies]

It would have cost them far less if they had the foresight to consider the chances of it happening, or at least try and arrange it with Telstra, who's more than capable of doing so in a way that would mitigate abuse from the service?

[tptacek]

How? How would it have cost them less? That seems like a good question to answer preemptively if you're going to make that argument. And, while you answer it, keep a running tally in your head of roughly how much it would cost in (1) legal fees and (2) delayed deployment (which has a cost you can break out in $/hour based on continued needless truck rolls as only one example) to negotiate that with the MNO.

When you're finished, weigh that cost against the benefit of reducing the legal fees for criminals who steal service from your meters.

[metageek]

>How? How would it have cost them less?

They could have arranged with Telstra to cut off service to any meter that billed over $X in a month.

In fact, that should have been an obvious step to make, because a meter that was sending too much data was probably buggy, which could mean the data it was sending was probably worthless. The engineers who failed to include the cutoff were insufficiently paranoid.

[iloveponies]

Now that this has happened, and both the MNO and the power company are trying to prevent it happening again, that would suggest they are changing the service, and thus the lawyers will be called back in again to amend the service agreement accordingly. Ignoring the costs associated with both the potential extra PR costs in cleaning this up, the costs associated with IT or modification to meters either installed or otherwise, or the costs with the power company's representation during the court case I could imagine that this return visit by the lawyers wouldn't be put onto the MNO's bill entirely, nor would they be getting a discount compared to the smaller amount of time I assume it would take to define the preventative requirements as part of the agreement before it was finalised.

[hugh3]

I can only assume that the $22-per-gig plan doesn't actually exist on a consumer level. Instead, this is some bizarre charging agreement which works between Telstra and the electric company, specifically for smart meter applications (which presumably don't send all that much data). Nobody ever bothered to think about what would happen if the SIM were taken out and used elsewhere, though they really should have.

Since the electric company is already out of pocket for the $200K, and since it's not Telstra's fault (and hence Telstra shouldn't have to pay the $200K back either) I guess charging the woman the full $200K as a deterrent (assuming she can afford to pay it) isn't too bad.

It does sound like a pretty harsh sentence, but if she'd gotten away with a slap on the wrist imagine what would happen next -- everyone would be ripping apart their electricity meters to get cheap internet access.

[tptacek]

This discussion also strips out everything that complicates the agreements utilities have with MNOs to handle smart metering traffic. These boxes get deployed in massive huge waves, tens of thousands at a time, and require terms of service that are not typical for normal MNO customers.

It's simply not reasonable to compare the rates payed by a utility for always-on reliable backhaul from hundreds of thousands of meters to those payed by a single mobile phone customer for "download web pages" data service.

[tptacek]

She committed a crime. This wasn't a civil suit.

Once again we see the phenomenon where technology makes everything easier, including criminal acts, resulting in shock and dismay when the consequences and penalties of those acts are not themselves mitigated by technology.

[Natsu]

Yes, she did, but I can't say that it merits 6 months in jail.

Charging $193,000 for what someone here estimated was about 90GB of data is, itself, highway robbery. But that's Telstra's fault, not the power company's.

[tptacek]

It might be highway robbery in the service model of iPhones downloading movies. That doesn't make it highway robbery in the context of access cards provisioned within the requirements and fee structure of a utility smart meter deployment. It does not all add up to the same thing.

[usedtolurk]

90GB of data was stolen - nobody is defending that. Some of us have trouble believing that 90GB of data is actually worth the $193,000 as determined by the Telstra contract.

The actual "damage" seems pretty small when compared to crimes which carry similar sentences. If Telstra had a fairer billing system, then a more appropriate sentence would have been more likely.

[georgieporgie]

You're right, it probably adds up to less. A utility company's meter likely doesn't demand the low latency that an iPhone user does. So, it's probably not even worth $80.

[tungwaiyip]

I agree. This is robbery! Completely anti-consumer! No sensible consumer or business could have pay this kind of service charge. Telstra could have easily block access to any individual with excessive network activity. The judge should reject this bill and ask arbitrator to come up with reasonable payment plan. Automatically upgrade her to unlimited plan and then add a small penalty should be a reasonable resolution.

Law maker should ban telco from excessive charge, say more than $1000 a month, unless authorized by the customer.

[tptacek]

Basically what you're saying is that Telstra should come up with a product to support people who steal the SIM cards out of utility smart meters.

[nagrom]

And what you are saying is that there is no possibility that such a feature network-wide (Email to main account holder: "Your phone bill has risen above $1,000 this month. Please make sure that this is not accidental.") would be useful to anyone else, ever.

Which is funny, because it's more or less standard in the UK, and most of the EU.

[tptacek]

What phone? The devices being billed aren't phones. There are no "phone bills" involved here.

[hboon]

This reminds me of a little adventure when I travelled to Malaysia for a sales call. It was terrible but funny (it involved a business partner dropping my USB HSDPA modem into his glass of water). A subplot of it was I let him use my modem while roaming. In the same afternoon, while I was having tea (I mean a meeting/discussion), I got a call from my carrier, on my main cell phone number, who asked if I was the one who used the service in the morning. I said yes and I asked how much it was. The answer was in the range of US$400.

I suppose they would have offered to suspend the line immediately if I had said no.

[Natsu]

This sort of thing also happens to people who do not steal SIM cards. It is all too common, sadly:

http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=news/bizarre&i...

$22,000 bill because son's data use wasn't covered in family cell phone plan.

http://www.switched.com/2007/12/14/man-gets-slapped-with-85-...

$85,000 phone bill. "It turns out that he was being charged on a per-kilobyte basis because his unlimited browsing plan didn't cover using the phone as a modem. As a "goodwill" gesture, Bell Mobility has dropped the bill to measly $3,243."

Finally, here's one from Telstra:

http://www.blackberryforums.com.au/forums/general-bis-discus...

"I have recently signed my BB 8800 up on a Telstra $39.95/mth plan which I understood was for unlimited email and internet browsing. I got the shock of my life when I checked my data usage online and saw a bill for $250+ after only a couple of days. On examining further I note that I have not been charged for blackberry.net connections but heavily charged for wap.telstra."

[tptacek]

I do not accept the notion that these are remotely comparable situations.

I agree with you that b2c MNO fee structures are predatory.

I do not agree that the fee structure arranged between two giant corporations can be described as "predatory" when it happens to bite the ass of someone who breaks into their network and uses it to steal connectivity.

[tungwaiyip]

I say is telecom should not be allow to gouge consumers. They should not charge consumer an amount that is clearly not agreed upon.

If you have misconfigured an app on your phone and it run up $10,000 network charge in month. Will you hand over your $10,000 to the phone company? Do you think this is a fair charge?

Cap the telco off how much they can charge unless authorized. I think this is most fair for both party. Telco can cut off access, but no to gouge consumer.

[tptacek]

The person who rips the SIM card out of their smart meter and uses to download stuff off the Internet isn't a consumer.

[stoney]

Maybe highway robbery, but pretty standard in Australia - mobile phones are expensive here. As someone pointed out in another comment, Telstra's standard price for off plan data is $2/Mb (for a consumer mobile, not a b2b contract which is presumably what the power company had). For 90Gb of data that works out at $180,000, so pretty consistent with the reported cost.

[Natsu]

Indeed. In spite of living on roughly the other side of the planet from them, I've heard many complaints about Telstra.

[samwise]

Let me pose this question.

If the damages were $2 and not $200,000 would you still think an 18 month sentence is justified ?

I would guess that most people would think not.

So the true cost of the damage is a significant factor in assessing the appropriate punishment

[tptacek]

I don't understand this argument. Neither 1 day nor 10,000 days in jail repays damages to the utility; meanwhile, neither 1% nor 100% of damages serves society's goal of deterring crime. What is the point you are trying to make? That people should either be punished for crimes, or required to repay damages?

From what I can tell, virtually every crime against property has a process for settling damages irrespective of the amount of time served in prison. "10-15 months in jail AND a fine not to exceed $50,000", and so on.

[_delirium]

The amount calculated as damages affects the kind of crime that it's categorized as though, which is why it's relevant. In the U.S. at least, if you cause $50 of damage, that's a different crime than if you cause $50,000 of damage, with different sentence ranges (same with theft, which has various categories based on dollar thresholds, and can actually switch it between a misdemeanor and felony).

That might not be the right way to do it, but it's the way it's currently done, anyway, which means that courts have to inquire into the "true" damages sustained in order to determine what crime the person should be charged with.

A solution could be not to take damages into account in cases like this, so the crime would just be "stealing a meter's SIM card and using it", which would be the same crime regardless of how much money that cost the utility.

[tptacek]

It doesn't look to me like the detention time involved here was computed from the damages. The two issues are orthogonal. We appear to agree on this point.

[ovi256]

They are not orthogonal. Amount of estimated damages differentiates between kinds of theft (petty larceny vs grand) and is pretty much directly used to calculate imprisonnement duration in hacking cases. Some 30000 USD/year, IIRC. That's why companies always inflate their damage reports. Severe abuse of justice for the defendant and the company risks pretty much nothing.

[nitrogen]

...meanwhile, neither 1% nor 100% of damages serves society's goal of deterring crime.

I would tend to disagree with this. Having to repay damages removes the benefit associated with the crime, so for ordinary sane people, it would act as a deterrent. In my opinion, jail is more appropriate for crimes where the criminal is likely to be an ongoing danger to society and no other option (probation, mandatory classes, etc.) would have the desired effect.

[archangel_one]

It's not much of a deterrent if you only pay the damages (assuming a reasonable definition of damages, which apparently doesn't exist here). You have a nonzero chance of getting away with the crime, in which case you don't pay - so your expected return for the crime is higher than for not committing it. This is exactly the kind of thing that higher deterrents are supposed to prevent.

[JoachimSchipper]

I can understand being surprised, though - I can see how one would expect $100-$1000 (in actual damages, not deterrence), not ~$200 000. Theft is still theft, of course, but technology is a surprisingly powerful lever.

[tptacek]

You're right, and I often sound like I'm blaming people for being surprised. People are right to be surprised. It's a reason, among many others, to be wary of the impact technology has on our life.

"Surprisingly powerful lever for criminality" is as good a summation of my thoughts on this as any I've heard; thanks!

[Jun8]

Your rational argument would better apply, I think, to a black-hat hacker (say geohot, not totally blackhat but is a recent example) rather than poor, uneducated woman with bipolar disorder with a history of abuse.

[tptacek]

That's a smokescreen. You will not find many people on HN who who think sentencing shouldn't be modified due to mitigating factors. I certainly don't think that.

But the arguments on this thread aren't only about going easy on someone simply because they're poor. They're also about how it's "highway robbery" for someone to go to jail and pay six figures for stealing a SIM card.

[Jun8]

I think everybody here agrees that she committed a crime. The discussion is whether the punishment is fair or not.

[tptacek]

I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. I was accusing the commenter upthread of framing this as if it was a civil matter.

[MarketingMuppet]

MAYBE an energy company shouldn't use unlocked 3G cards to insecurely transmit data and allow anyone who gets their hands on a card to rack up $200k? Just saying.

[yason]

The SIM plan used by the electric company might come from a contract that favors small amounts of data transfer. A meter probably won't use many kilobytes or megabytes per month. If I were such a company I'd try to negotiate for expensive $/byte ratio and very low if negligible monthly fee, knowing I will only ever transfer small amounts of data.

[pyre]

What happens when one of your systems becomes buggy and starts using lots of data transfer? Oops!

[eropple]

Then you learn a painful lesson about fixing your systems. But in that case, you're at fault, and are on the hook yourself.

Here? Not so much.

[pyre]

To me the lesson would be that things break, and deals like this should probably include some sort of cushion. I'd be cautious of just banking on the fact that we'd never have to pick up a huge bandwidth bill because nothing would ever go wrong.

[hugh3]

4 months internet access = approx $80.

If the worst possible punishment for stealing something was that you had to pay back the cost of the item then the justice system would be doing a pretty piss-poor job of deterring theft.

[pyre]

That may be, but they are claiming that $193k+ is the cost of what she took, which I doubt very much is the case.

If someone steals a fake piece of art from my house worth $80, can I turn around and claim that it was the original and therefore worth millions that should be repaid to me?

[tptacek]

No, you cannot claim that.

However, when a utility gets a bill from an MNO for $193k for services they contractually agreed to, and that bill is a result of a criminal action or a tort, it becomes easy to establish $193k as basis for damages in court.

[thailandstartup]

That contract could have been written to make them contractually liable for $75 trillion dollars. Following your logic, it would then be easy to establish $75 trillion dollars as a basis for damages.

[tptacek]

(In US law, at least) Clauses that impose "penalties" which are not directly rooted in liquidated damages are unenforceable.

This is not a case about a penalty clause; the damages here emerge straightforwardly from the MNO's usage contract with the utility. The thief didn't stumble across a landmine clause that said "parties agree theft of SIM card incurs $100,000 of damage"; instead, the thief continuously used a metered service that resulted in a 6-figure charge.

One imagines it would be possible to dispute a six-figure liquidated damages claim by arguing that the metered charge was devised in such as way as to deliberately create a penalty clause. My point here being, these things aren't so black and white as to be trivially adjudicated by geeks on a message board. But I think we all in the back of our heads realize that the fee structure for smart meter mobile data isn't an elaborate scam to entrap SIM card thieves.

So, no, your example doesn't work. Companies cannot simply write "you owe me a zillionty squillion dollars if you steal my stuff" and have that hold up in court.

[Natsu]

I wonder, however, if the power company will itself actually suffer $183,000 in damages. Every time I've heard of someone accidentally racking up insane charges like this, they've been able to negotiate it to something reasonable.

So I do believe that knowing the true damages, and not just the dollar figure specified by the contract, is relevant here.

[thailandstartup]

The two companies can write whatever they like in the contract between themselves. You seem to agree that the contract should be held to some standard of reasonableness where it is used to establish damages caused by some third party. You think 200K is reasonable. I do not.

The position you're advocating is that a contract between two private companies should be used to calculate damages for a criminal act. That's a very bad idea - it makes those companies legislators.

[thailandstartup]

If I had a contract with a company that charged $193K to replace said $80 artwork - should I then be able to claim $193K damages?

[tptacek]

No, because that scenario isn't any different from the original scenario proposed.

The utility is in this case contractually obligated to pay those fees. The basis for damages here is straightforward.

[hugh3]

Besides, "eighty bucks" is a silly estimate anyway. Nobody in Australia will sell you unlimited 3G data for twenty bucks a month. If you think that's unfair compared to other countries, remember that Australia has a population density of two people per square kilometre, and that Telstra actually has a pretty darn good coverage in their 3G network (Optus and Vodafone are cheaper but can't be expected to work reliably outside major cities).

Somebody mentioned $22 a gig... well, the highest-data plan on http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/browsing_packs.html is $69 for twelve gigs a month, with excess data charged at five cents a meg, or fifty dollars a gig. That sounds like a lot, but as we've said, the 3G network really isn't designed for individual customers doing terabytes of data per day... they clearly don't want you using 3G in that way.

[orangecat]

Agreed, some jail time is appropriate. Destroying her financially to "compensate" the victim for a hugely inflated loss isn't.

[hugh3]

We really don't know anything about this woman's financial situation apart from the fact that she's on a disability pension. A fine of $200K may not be "destroying her" financially. (Remember, this is Australia, where it's hard to buy a house for under a million dollars nowadays...)

[cynicalkane]

Here's the part that alarmed me:

> Justice Tennent said Monks destroyed the card when she realised it did not belong to Mr Freeman.

Yet she still hands down 6 months of jail, 12 months of suspended sentence, and almost $200,000 of fines. What?

[reedlaw]

I don't think the judge believed her story. Besides, doesn't a jury get to decide her guilt?

[kenj0418]

Not if she pleads guilty.

[tzs]

So she's cool being part of his obvious movie piracy operation until she finds out he doesn't own the SIM card?

[AlexC04]

Mr. Gordon Freeman?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Freeman

First thing I thought. She was being questioned, had to make up a name on the spot and immediately came up with the main character in Half Life.

[geon]

$193000 / 4 months

If she was downloading at max 3G speed 24-7, that's still $22 per GB.

[monochromatic]

Well then she should have used a reasonable rate plan and only spent $80, instead of using someone else's plan and racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of their money.

[Jun8]

She is a clueless, poor person. I agree she should be punished somehow, but this is a life devastating sentence, especially the $193K. How can you be so draconian?

If we want to follow the law to the letter we don't need judges, something like Watson would be more than adequate (and cheaper).

[monochromatic]

If Aurora actually paid that 193k, then she should repay them for it. But it's not clear to me from the article that they did, and I can't really imagine that they did. If Aurora never paid that bill, she ought to be liable to Telstra for whatever she can get them to reduce the bill to.

[hugh3]

She is a clueless, poor person.

There's no indication that she's clueless or poor. A clueless person probably wouldn't have any use for the insane amount of data she downloaded. And a court probably wouldn't impose a $183,000 fine on a person who was both poor and disabled.

She's on a disability pension, but disability pensions aren't means-tested.

[Jun8]

Please read the sentence (http://www.supremecourt.tas.gov.au/cops/monks_k_m). Here's the judge's own description of her:

"You are 33 years old. You have one conviction for stealing in 2002. I accept it was probably a relatively minor matter because it was dealt with by way of a fine. Your upbringing was unstable in the extreme. You lived in the streets for most of your teenage years and became involved in drinking alcohol and drug taking. You have been diagnosed with depression and bi-polar disorder. You are socially isolated and spend long periods at home alone and accessing the Internet. You have no family support being largely estranged from parents and siblings. You are in receipt of a disability pension. You have incurred debts and have difficulty managing money. It is doubtful that you will ever repay the money stolen by your use of the card."

Evidently she spends a lot of time on the Internet, so she is not clueless in that sense, but from this description she doesn't sound very educated either.

[mcantelon]

Did she know the Internet use was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? It's unclear in the article.

[derobert]

Strikes me as it shouldn't be a question of if she knew, but rather is several months of Internet access worth nearly $200k?

Taking dspillett's example, if what the victim claimed (and even believed) to be a priceless Stradivarius actually turned out to be a modern mass-produced instrument, it'd be deeply unfair to make the defendant pay as if it were.

[dspillett]

She almost certainly knew that she should not be using it. If I stole a priceless Stradivarius would I be punished any differently if in court I claimed to have thought it was just a cheap bit of wood with some strings attached?

The sentence does seem harsh to me too, but generally speaking ignorance is not an acceptable defence espscially when the ignorance is not knowing/caring about the scale of the offence rather than just being ignorant that it is an offence at all.

[orangecat]

If I stole a priceless Stradivarius would I be punished any differently if in court I claimed to have thought it was just a cheap bit of wood with some strings attached?

Quite possibly. Intent often matters, e.g. involuntary manslaughter vs murder.

[asr]

Actually, this is not true (at least in the US... not sure how it translates to other common law countries). Your mistake about the facts doesn't excuse you if you still knew you were committing a crime. (I'm having a hard time finding a concise source, but try googling "strict liability for grading").

As for murder, the penalties there do differ depending on your state of mind, but that's not an issue of mistake (you can't try to third-degree murder someone but mistakenly first-degree murder them).

Not to say I agree with the punishment in this case, though.

[_delirium]

I agree you can't try to 3rd-degree murder someone and accidentally 1st-degree murder them, but you can try to non-fatally injure someone and, due to being mistaken about the facts, end up killing them (e.g. because you were mistaken about the effects of a poison you used). In that case, you do indeed get convicted of a lesser crime, if the court/jury believe you.

In the theft and criminal damages context, you could have an analog, though we don't currently, where being judged guilty of one of the more major theft or damages offenses (like "theft over $X") requires an intent to cause that level of theft or damages. If you meant to cause $50 in damages and actually caused $50k, that could be a lesser offense than if you meant to cause $50k in damages. You'd be found guilty of essentially "damage over $X but with intent to only cause damage under $X", the way 3rd-degree murder and manslaughter are lesser offenses due to the lack of intent to cause death, even when there was intent to violently injure non-fatally.

[gcb]

that. and if the priceless stradivarius was trhow into the sidewalk like any other cheap violin. i doubt the case would take much the priceless part into consideration

[dspillett]

But the SIM card was not just discarded where it could be picked up idly. To get at it a device had to be opened. OK so opening the device to get to the SIM probably wasn't difficult, but neither would be opened a violin case and you would not "accidentally" open the device and be surprised to find a SIM in there...

[jbooth]

A priceless stradivarious is a totally different ballgame than a very easily priced amount of gigabytes of 3G transfer. Some sense of market prices for what she actually used should have weighed in here, but obviously it didn't.

[hugh3]

As I said elsewhere, even on Telstra's most data-generous plan they charge $69 a month for the first twelve gigs and fifty bucks a gig after that.

Basically they have a pretty tenuous, very expensive 3G network to serve an enormous sparsely populated area and they really don't want people to use it to download large amounts of data. They're happy to sell you a wired link for that purpose.

[r00fus]

4 months wireless internet access != priceless stradivarius. Artificial scarcity fail.

The problem here is Telstra and/or the power company for not securing their SIM card or account.

At the very least this "Mr. Freeman" should be involved in the case as he removed the SIM card, which is probably a violation in and of itself.

[bdonlan]

That is the same amount that Aurora was charged for the network access; essentially, she was ordered to make Aurora whole, which is basically the whole point of a civil action.

[tlrobinson]

It certainly didn't cost Telstra $193K, and I seriously doubt Telstra held Aurora to that charge, at least not if they wanted to keep them as a customer.

[allwein]

Here's a good analogy:

NYC Cabs charge $2 per mile while their driving. So a 20 mile trip costs $40. But you're arguing that since the car gets 20 miles per gallon of gas, it should only cost $4.