Help: FBI criminally charged me with $6MM loss for hotlinking. I didn't do it

[your_username]

Throwaway for obvious reasons.

I’ll try to be as concise as possible. Some details have been changed to protect myself.

I used to operate a website that hotlinked to an asset from $company’s S3 bucket. When $company was made aware of my doing from the FBI, the FBI asked them to calculate the loss amount. They did this by looking at IPs that hit the bucket over a span of 1 month, and the IPs that logged into $company’s service. The number of IPs that they didn’t recognize (about 25,000), multiplied by some multiplier, came out to about $6MM.

The problem: I know how many people I had on my website that hit that asset. It was in the hundreds, not the thousands, definitely not tens of thousands. I know this because my site required a subscription and I know how many subscribers I had. There were (and still are!) hundreds of sites that hotlink to $company’s S3 bucket today, causing them loss, that are free and easily accessible. I can show this.

When I told my lawyer that this couldn’t possibly have been calculated correctly, he said that I’m pretty SOL in arguing this loss amount. He’s not technical so I don’t know if he really understands. Regardless, I’m in the process of discharging him because he’s failed me multiple times in this case so far.

This reeks of all sorts of wrong. $company is an organization known to probably 95% of HNers, they’re a technical organization, and they could not have possibly made the calculation in good faith.

If anyone has any advice, I’d appreciate it. I’ll be checking this thread closely, but I can also be reached by email at hotlinking@protonmail[.]com.

[smoyer]

First, I understand your technical arguments above (but IANAL.) Find a technical lawyer who understands that your logs and/or subscribers list sets a hard limit to the damage you might have caused. I'm a bit curious about why you're being charged at all if the S3 bucket was publicly available - there are easy ways for the company to secure their bucket if they choose (one example - https://www.msp360.com/resources/blog/how-to-prevent-hotlink...).

You're headline states that you didn't do it but your descriptions admits you did, but maybe not all of it. You need to be completely honest with this. The journalist in Missouri who identified teachers SSNs on the state's web-site was in a similar situation and, while he's ultimately not going to be charged, his legal fees are hefty.

[lalahazel]

My understanding is they admitted they did it but not to the extent of loss this company is claiming they did-- thus would legally make the case more severe with sentencing...

[otterley]

IAAL, but am not providing legal advice here.

If this is a criminal case (I assume it is, given the FBI's involvement), the presiding judge has pretty wide discretion to set the terms of the punishment for a conviction, subject to the specific penalties imposed by law and federal sentencing guidelines. Unlike in a civil case, monetary penalties are intended to be punitive, not restorative. The best your attorney can do is make the case as best as they can and plea bargain with the AUSA to get the penalty as low as possible; and failing that, beg the court for mercy, and be thankful if you manage not to go to prison.

You can also plead innocence, go to trial, and hopefully avoid conviction altogether.

(BTW, this post can be admitted into evidence if it comes to the AUSA's attention.)

[Canada]

Why are you facing any liability whatsoever for linking to public resources?

If the owner of that S3 bucket is facing losses from serving files to the public, why don't they revoke public access? S3 prints big warnings that you are making things public, so it's unreasonable for a company to claim "We didn't mean to make this public"

What was in the bucket? In any case, sounds like you need a better lawyer, I don't see how HN can help you without you going public and telling the whole story.

[gdfgjhs]

It seems everyday web is turning into ask permission before you do anything environment. Companies instead of hiring competent technical person, spend money on lawyers and lawsuits.

It is scary for someone who grew up on 90s' Internet. Not sure what was in the bucket, but in 90s and 2000s, it was common to link to various resources on the web. My friend in college ran a popular forum where people shared direct links to video games, softwares, pdfs, etc. It, of course, facilitate piracy, but not everything linked there was illegal.

I run a blog where I curate and embed YouTube videos. Yes I am using their official embed code. Using standard http protocol to link to a resource on the web is official way to link. If they were bypassing url signature or something similar, then I can see how they were violating terms and conditions of that bucket owner.

[otterley]

It is no defense to burglary that the homeowner left their front door unlocked.

[theli0nheart]

This is a little different. This is akin to knocking on the door, asking if you can be let in, being invited in by the homeowner, and then having them give a tour around the house.

It's entirely up to the owner of an S3 bucket as to who they serve their static assets to. If the policies are so lenient that anyone can request the resources, then that is a configuration error—not unauthorized access.

[otterley]

You are falsely assuming that allowing public access and serving the requested object constitutes an intentional act of invitation by a bucket owner. If the alleged victim sought the FBI's assistance, it seems pretty clear that they did not intend to extend such an invitation, regardless of the bucket's configuration.

Or, to extend the metaphor I made earlier, just because I left the door unlocked, it doesn't mean I meant to invite anyone in. And if they tricked my housekeeper to invite them in by falsely claiming I authorized them to come to pick up my broken laptop, they'd have no invitation defense, either. (Maybe they wouldn't be guilty of burglary, but certainly larceny.)

Unauthorized access can occur whether the bucket is public or not. The law does not require that sufficient measures (or any measures, really) be taken to protect the assets in question. We can disagree as to whether it should, but that's not how it's written today.

Before making comparative arguments here, it's a good idea to think about whether a judge would laugh at you or not. :-)

[titusjohnson]

Please don't attempt to equate internet traffic to door locking. It's a tired old argument that fails the moment critical thought is applied.

> Unauthorized access can occur whether the bucket is public or not. The law does not require that sufficient measures (or any measures, really) be taken to protect the assets in question. We can disagree as to whether it should, but that's not how it's written today.

Citation needed. Probably more than one. Web scraping is most certainly legal. Everything involved in the ridiculous "breaking and entering an unlocked residential door" is done a billion times a day by web scrapers as a matter of course. The act if doing GET / wraps up finding a home, evaluating its entrances, knocking, opening the door, and taking photos of the entryway. In 50ms.

I do agree with your last line. Definitely think about whether a judge would laugh at you or not...

[otterley]

> Please don't attempt to equate internet traffic to door locking. It's a tired old argument that fails the moment critical thought is applied.

It's a useful metaphor that gets people convicted. You might not like it or agree with it, but that's the way it is.

> Web scraping is most certainly legal. Everything involved in the ridiculous "breaking and entering an unlocked residential door" is done a billion times a day by web scrapers as a matter of course

Unfortunately you, like others, are ignoring the crucial element of consent. Web scraping is done lawfully only with the consent of the website scraped. When scraping is done non-consensually -- even if the website is public -- it can be considered trespass to chattels and might even constitute a CFAA violation. I know this because my company scraped eBay without their consent in the late 1990s/early 2000s and was shut down by a lawsuit. See, e.g., eBay v. Bidder's Edge, 100 F. Supp. 2d 1058 (N.D. Cal. 2000) (not my specific employer at the time, but in the same business).

Ignore robots.txt at your peril, and treat the absence of one as a lack of consent. That's what Google and other search engines do.

[giantg2]

Most of the time trespassing (which is more akin to this than burglary) requires the owner to post obvious notice or ask the person to leave. I did not see that intentional act here either.

So there's no intentional act by the owner either way. In the physical world, no crime would be committed. It seems this is further reinforced by the fact that AWS documentation repeatedly states that buckets can be accessed publicly or secured depending on the settings. Kind of like the government (in most states) saying people can walk through your property unless you take steps to prevent it.

Yes, judges will laugh at a defendant bringing this up, but will eat up whatever comparisons a prosecutor makes.

[tinus_hn]

It’s probably not about the contents being public but more about paying the bandwidth costs.

[antifa]

I'm kind of wondering what the legal precedent is for the FBI to investigate "hotli king" instead of just telling the devops person making the bucket private + CDN'd.

[otterley]

I think this is highly unlikely. That would be grounds for a civil suit, but probably not a criminal prosecution.

[tinus_hn]

The criminal part would be using another’s credentials (the s3 keys) as your own.

[otterley]

The situation being discussed is an open bucket, with no access credentials required.

[tinus_hn]

Obviously no traditional access credentials are required because otherwise it wouldn’t be usable to link to (by the owner). But as with the codes you use to embed Google Maps in a website, there could be part of the URL that can be considered to function as something like an access credential.

Anyway I presume if the FBI ‘criminally charged’ the poster the charge included the criminal law they are accusing him of breaking.

[replygirl]

IANAL but it sounds like the fact that you offered a subscription service for access to $company's asset puts you in more trouble. you may have only gotten x dollars from your subscribers, but it's hard to dispute that you intended to extract y dollars in potential lifetime revenue from those 25k monthly visitors, especially if your revenue growth hasn't been trending negative. it's arguable those free sites didn't cause $company any loss, as those people may not have been interested in the asset had they had to pay for it, but if someone pays you instead of the owner of the IP...

[faangiq]

This sucks and shouldn’t be a crime. But the iron fist of Uncle Sam has struck and you’re screwed basically. Try to get a very good lawyer, I’d focus your efforts on that.

[vgeek]

As little as 10 years ago, the most common solution to hotlinking was swapping out the hotlinked images with something different/offensive to shoo away the hotlinker. Or various anti-hotlinking scripts. Or maybe even check request headers against your own domain at the server level. Now the solution is a 7 figure cry of foul enforced by the FBI? Was the offense more egregious and involved hotlinking of novel IP, leading to more aggressive enforcement?

[titusjohnson]

If you don't have money you spend a few evenings setting up referrer protection of some fashion and serve goatse to unauthorized clients. Problem self-solves over time. I was on the receiving end of this a few times, back when I was young and had no way of paying for my own legit image hosting.

If you have money you may also have scale and a public image, so this solution is not so palatable. And since you have money and lawsuits are socially acceptable, you go that route.

If sending security to your house with baseball bats were socially acceptable that would be the route utilized.

[rosndo]

This story doesn’t really make sense. What would you risk by truthfully telling us what company and what kind of assets you’re talking about?

You shouldn’t be having this conversation with the FBI anyway, these details are figured out in courts.

[runnerup]

Most likely OP cannot afford the team of comprehensive legal advisors which would be necessary to achieve a truly fair outcome. I imagine OP has been dealing with this situation mostly silently for approximately a year by now. The "wheels of justice" turn slowly but generally inexorably. Once the FBI decides to bring charges, they almost always have already completely made up their mind and get exactly the outcome they want.

OP's life has been and will continue to be thoroughly destroyed by the consequences of their poor judgement and there's likely no actions OP can take at this point to change the medium-term outcomes. Barring winning the lottery (in some form or another), OP would not be able to pay this debt if they lived to be 1,000 years old. And it's not dischargeable in bankruptcy. That's ignoring any potential jail time and consequences on OP's future employment options.

So, quite frankly, at this point OP is probably posting here in a state of pseudo-panic, because there's very little chance this post would make it worse now that he's already been criminally charged -- again, 99+% of the time, the main outcomes are usually decided at the time of charging, not sentencing.

Long-term, OP may be able to eventually build a life that they are happy with. But they will have many, many doors closed to them.

On an absolute scale, it's possible that OP's actions directly caused a response that wasted many, many man-years of labor even if the data leaked wasn't itself important (technical and legal investigation, management conversations/energy/time that could have been spent on other things, security containment and mitigation, FBI investigators times, the courts time). Its probably not possible for OP to "pay back" the time and energy to all those people that they've affected.

But on a relative scale, its likely that no individual or corporation was threatened with existential harm over this, while OP certainly is facing what feels like existential consequences. So that will be very very hard for them to deal with right now.

[rosndo]

If OP wants advice beyond “get a better lawyer”, it would be useful to know what they actually did or are accused of doing.

As it stands his post doesn’t really provide any useful details beyond “I’m facing federal charges and am not happy with my lawyer”.

[ffhhj]

> Instead of communicating a copy of the image, Google provides HTML instructions that direct a user’s browser to a website publisher’s computer that stores the full-size photographic image.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking

It seems Google saved its butt with that explanation. Can you do the same?

[titusjohnson]

Mostly true, image search results are shown to the user using a base64 encoded thumbnail representation of the source. Focused view results in a request made to the source image inline with Google's site. They definitely store & process copies. Color search, subject search, none of that is possible without storage of some kind. Freshness searches require polling resources with modest frequency, too.

[psygnisfive]

Contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This is literally what they do. I don't know if they'll take up the case, but talk to them.

[pyuser583]

Sadly the EFF is not usually in a position to serve as a technical witness in criminal cases.

[giantg2]

"he said that I’m pretty SOL in arguing this loss amount."

That's how I see it. The government has obscene resources and power to prosecute you. Even if you win, you'll likely be screwed with the cost to defend. The law generally favors the victim and in many cases judges seem to accept any amount that can explained, even if it's not fair.

[nextlevelwizard]

Murica is pretty fucked up country if you can get sued for linking to a public resource on the web.

[otterley]

America is a great country because we respect people's intent, even if they make inadvertent mistakes.

[segmondy]

Why will the FBI just randomly tell a company you linked to their site? There's more to this, but get a better lawyer, and the FBI won't be the one to calculate/charge you. Sorry, but your story doesn't add up.

[spansoa]

Aren't cases like this a rare exception and you're let away with a slap on the wrist by Amazon and they will look the other way? If you keep doing it, you will have to cough up the funds, so just learn from the lesson?

[ss108]

You shouldn't be posting on here, you should be looking for another lawyer.

Sounds like you have a good argument to lower the restitution you'd owe if convicted. Great. But a) ideally you're not convicted; b) somone has to take your argument and prove it in court

You need a solid lawyer. That is it.

[jrc2022]

This is not legal advice. IANAL.

Please seek better legal representation.

There's legislated protection for you and also already US case law as precedent.

[giantg2]

Links?