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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like yet another over-zealous prosecutor hell bent on putting non-violent [and non-criminals] behind bars.

Nah just an idiot sheriff having a power trip[1].

[1] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-court...

That seems unlikely. How would prosecuting this case rebound to a prosecutor's advantage in anyone's eyes? "Ha ha, we contracted with these people to do security work for us, but we sure showed them when we hit them with criminal charges for the things we're paying them to do! Nothing says I'll pursue justice like paying to entrap people and prosecuting people with the opposite of mens rea. Elect me or promote me as appropriate, I'm openly a treacherous lunatic!"

Incarceration is a tool for over-zealous prosecutors, not a terminal goal. That tool won't help them advance their actual goals in this case.

(Of course, tools that get used a lot can accidentally become terminal goals if a non-self-reflective agent gets too cognitively lazy. Still, the intelligence bar for "prosecutor" is probably high enough we should credit them with generally knowing what they're doing. And even if they were being this lazy, their full attention would be brought to this case when it first hit the media.)

The goal of the sheriff and the prosecutor is to stand tall in their ongoing conflict with the state institution, of which this pentest is just the latest event.

It's empathically not "we contracted with these people to do security work for us", it's that "our enemies from the Iowa state contracted these people to try and screw us".

They succeeded in getting some of these enemies caught, so they will make a point to their local voters as "we sure showed those bastards from the state agencies that they have no right to come here and shove their noses in our business" (which they've already explicitly stated to local press in pretty much the same words), that's a win already for a certain class of the local voters.

Their goals explictly include making it harder for 'enemy agents' to operate. If they use every technicality within the bounds of the law to make it as prolonged and difficult as possible, they're making a statement that attempting to attack them in this manner will result in retailiation - if it makes it hard for Iowa state to employ other pentesters in the future, excellent, mission accomplished, that fits the goals of these local agencies very well. They treat this mission as an explicit attack against them, and they want to deter attacks like these with whatever power they've got - which includes the ability to arrest people.

Or just an relatively innocent combination of dumbfuckery and confusion. The prosecutor probably already wants to drop the whole matter and try to forget about it, but it's political now.

Yep. Someone has his or her eye on a higher office.

Or an interest in disruption at any and all available opportunities.

Can you ELI5 why putting pentesters in prison would help a prosecutor get promoted to a higher office?

Wouldn't it just piss off (among others) the very people who have the authority to promote the prosecutor to a higher office?

Prosecutor gets to go trumpet a victory over those who would show such disresepect to the law as to try to break into the courthouse itself (or various press releases to similar effect).

The "very people who have the authority to promote the prosecutor" are the voters, who, for the most part, do not understand what pen-testing is, or that it exists, or that it is (or can be, when done correctly) a legitimate thing.

ELI5 A person is smart, people are stupid. Voters are people, and details get lost in campaigns.

Perceived "easy win" for conviction rate due to a fundamental lack of understanding of the issue. This backfired hilariously.

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