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2 obres 36 Membres 2 Ressenyes

Sobre l'autor

David Locke Hall was a federal prosecutor for twenty-three years. He served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve for thirty years, retiring at the rank of captain. He lives near Philadelphia, where he works in private practice.

Obres de David Locke Hall

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Nom oficial
Hall, David Locke
Gènere
male

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Ressenyes

This is a story about how an American federal prosecutor spent a lot of government time and money to catch the equivalent of a guy selling bootleg CDs at a bazaar. The irony of him writing about how catching street drug pushers is ineffective is wholly lost on the author. It's mildly amusing to read about the utter befuddlement (self admitted) he experiences trying to figure out what is happening but this grows thin pretty quickly. Obviously, the US government is not as clueless as this author would like you to believe although they can't be said to be winning the war (of which this story is not part of) either.… (més)
 
Marcat
Paul_S | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | Dec 23, 2020 |
These are the kind of books I like to review – short, informative, a recap of news I missed, and a source for follow up reading.

And I don’t I have to pay for it. Because these books always seem a bit overpriced considering they are short and summarize a lot of news. This one’s fairly cheap though.

As our subject, Xiang Li, the man behind the titular software cracking site Crack99, might say, “The product is pretty. You be pleased. Go tell other people.”
As you would expect from a longtime Assistant US Attorney used to bringing juries to the desired conclusions, Hall recounts his case against Li convincingly and clearly.

He takes us through Homeland Security Investigations (HSI – Homeland Security’s investigative arm that finds it more amenable to pursue counterfeit purses than illegal aliens) showing him the childish looking Crack99 site.

The software it sold for one percent of retail were not versions of Microsoft Office or Adobe products. These programs were very expensive – tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each – and used for very sophisticated engineering and manufacturing uses. Generally, for a lot of this stuff, you need to, as a mere prerequisite, be an engineer or physicist.

Hall takes us through the legal facts, questions, and obstacles to prosecuting someone running a software pirate site: establishing identity, location of the criminal, criminal intent, establishing whether selling pirated software – sans any physical product but just file transfers over the internet – is stealing. And, of course, there is the not trivial problem of physical getting the cuffs on Mr. Li and taking him back for trial in America.

Hall is a personable fellow who seems to have led an interesting life outside of being a lawyer and he drops in some “war stories” at the beginning of each chapter. That causes a bit of a problem on the concise narration front because one such story is actually a chapter on the arrest of an Iranian arms merchant, Amir Ardebili. (A story covered in John Shiffman’s Operation Shakespeare: The True Story of an Elite International Sting.) Granted, it’s there to show how you go about arresting international criminals on foreign soil and extradite them with the cooperation of other countries, but it’s also 32 pages out of a 290 page story.

Hall is hardly the first ex-public servant to use a book to push his ideas of reform. It’s hard to argue that Chinese industrial espionage goes hand in hand with their military spying and poses a very real threat to American economic and military (and, thus, national) security though Hall makes clear that he has no certain proof that Xiang Li had ties to the Chinese government. Hall wants more people in the US Department of Justice and military to follow his lead and prosecute these software pirates.
… (més)
 
Marcat
RandyStafford | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | Sep 29, 2015 |

Estadístiques

Obres
2
Membres
36
Popularitat
#397,831
Valoració
3.0
Ressenyes
2
ISBN
13