Or perhaps, "Here's a binder with numbered pages; turn to page 345 for your information." You wonder what's on page 346, so you turn the page, and lo and behold, someone else's information.
If once you find the information on page 346, you then keep flipping and looking at people's private information on the next hundred pages like the OP did, you have now committed a crime. The fact that you can easily access something, does not give you the right to access it. If you think otherwise, you think malware that steals your contact and banking info is legal. No, not the one that hacks into your computer. The solitaire game you download and install that has a trojan in it.
After all, you gave the solitaire game access to your hard drive to save and read its own games. Perfectly fine for it to scan the rest of your files. You gave it access to your network card so you can upload your scores. Perfectly fine for it to capture all other network traffic. All trojans are now legal as long as they're packaged with software you voluntarily install.
I agree that morally, the guy should certainly not have continued to look through what he knew was private information he wasn't meant to have access to. I'm not sure the law sees a difference between looking at pages 347-350 and and looking at page 346 however.
Page 346 was an accident - your intent was to read Your data. In viewing Further pages, as the OP stated for the explicit purpose of viewing other people's confidential medical data, the intent is a crime. It's the same thing as walking up to someone's desk in an office you're allowed to be in, and looking through their files.
I don't know what the actual law is, but given the benefits to society of "good people" reporting this kind of issue, I think that toying around with something like that should be considered not a crime at all, rather than being considered a lower-severity crime.
He did not report the issue after finding it. He abused the security hole for his own benefit. He is a criminal.
Low severity? In civil court, they can take every penny he has, every penny he'll ever earn, and his house. In criminal court, he can be charged with unauthorized access to a computer system, one charge each time he did it. And he did it a lot, and they have logs. Which is all literally in his post.
Viewing other people's medical information is not a low severity crime btw.
I would say it's more like:
You are walking down the street, and notice that there is a public noticeboard. It has a list of names, yours among them, associated with a number of steps each. It instructs you to walk a certain number of steps down the street, and then look up at the paper taped to the sidewalk that many steps down.
So, you do, and upon looking down, you see some personal information about yourself! You are a little perplexed, since this doesn't seem very secure. So you take one step back, and look down. Wow, yep, not very secure, there's information there too!
Being a human, you are naturally a little nosy and curious, and as these are publicly posted, after all, you glance through a couple more before finally regaining control of your better sense of civic duty, and report to the owner of the notice board that there is a problem with their "security".
I think this is a better analogy because:
* browsing to a web page is NOT the same thing as going into someone's house. * the internet is public. * there was CLEARLY no malicious intent. The OP clearly didn't harm or intend to harm anyone here, even if perhaps he should have immediately stopped when he began to suspect the website had a flaw and he shouldn't be able to see this information. I see no evidence of malice here.
I do agree that in general, just because a system responds 200 OK, you're not necessarily clear to do anything you want when when you're doing is obviously wrong. But at the same time, we should NOT be prosecuting or blaming people when they're able to access more than they're supposed to be able to PLAINLY due to the software's design insufficiencies and there's otherwise clearly no intent to cause harm.
We really need to take a more even-handed approach to this. And, we REALLY need some kind of a professional bar in software engineering. I would expect a student in their final year of CS to be able to produce a more secure system than what the OP described, so the fact that it exists in a quasi-government website is a complete fucking joke, if you'll pardon my language.