That's not Orwellian or authoritarian--it's a basic part of "social" behavior in a society with private property.

However, when you make those files available through a web server, you make the "public".

You then have the ability to limit the access to those files through any one of a large number of techniques to make them private again. Now if there were evidence that they tried (and failed) to use one of these techniques or that the teenager in question deliberately circumvented these techniques, then you would have a point.

One (not particularly good) way of limiting access to files without verifying identity would be to create a hash (say using the requesters email address and the request ID) and use this in the url to access the document (similar to how google docs implement sharable document links).

If they had done this, then perhaps you could legitimately claim that there was evidence of intent to restrict access.

An incremented ID is the opposite. It is a sign that you wanted people to be able to easily predict the correct url to download the next file from. Using an incremented ID is in fact evidence that this information was intended to be public.

He literally asked the web server "can I have these files" and it responded with "yes, you are authorized, here you go".

If he wasn't authorized, the server should have responded with a 403 Forbidden!

Web servers are built around authentication and access rights! It is not the teen's fault that the government doesn't know how to configure them properly.

Edit: after few days you realize that the trash on your curb shouldn't have been there. Then you raid the trash company because your brother is a cop.

Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights.

This is a non-sequitur, nobody is saying anything about anyone's property rights being revoked.

The teen asked for access, and the content owners, via the permissions they had configured, granted it. Sure they can later decide that this was a mistake, but that doesn't make it theft for the teen to have asked for access.

They made a mistake when configuring their web server. It's obvious that this was a mistake because some of the documents contained private information from Canadian citizens.

Per the tech article, it was an open archive of public documents that the government published periodically. The reasonable assumption is that the files were all public, and there's no reason to suspect the teenager in this case thought otherwise. The fact that ~3% of the files weren't properly redacted (whatever that means) is hardly "obvious".

> Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights.

Let's keep things constructive please.

It doesn't matter if we're talking about physical property in the real world or virtual property on a server.

Leaving your property on the curb is a good example. If someone takes it, you would be hard pressed to get it back from a legal standpoint.

This is very similar. The government left all those documents on the curb.

But there weren't in this case. The express purpose of the site was to make that information publicly accessible. If you leave stuff out at your curb with a sign that says "Free to all takers", and someone takes something you didn't mean to put there, how are they supposed to know you didn't want them to take it?

This is the big problem here. There's no way the way the Freedom of Information Act in Canada is written the way it is because of the democratic wishes of Canadians. Every day our government moves further away from governing according to the will of Canadians and more toward the will of.....I don't even know. Saying it is the will of politicians doesn't explain some of the strange behavior we've been seeing in this country for quite some time.

If our fate is to ultimately live under a quasi-dictatorship masquerading as a democracy, then so be it, but I wish we could just be honest about it. This objectively false "Canada is a democratic nation" claim is infuriating to me.