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naive question. Is it a violation of law to download these files? I dont want to be in any kind of trouble for five minutes of excitement.

edit: I currently live in the US.

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I guess it depends on where you live... but I'm not touching anything with that much CC data in it.

Good luck.

I'm not sure merely downloading the data from a public source is a crime, but I'm hiding behind academic research anyway.

How much cover does the "academic research" argument actually give? Any experience with that?

Not any first-hand, and I hope never to have to find out. Still, I suspect "I am an RA working with a security researcher and we're studying password strength" would go over better than "I'm curious", although they amount to the same thing. The respect and deference we afford institutions can be a bit strange, at times.

I live in the US.

IANAL.

Imagine the policy scans you computer and it contains dozen of valid CC numbers, or something that links to that.

You'd be in troubles. Thus I'd say, while it may or may not be illegal - it's probably a bad idea to get and store that stuff.

"something that links to that" like my browser's cache of news.ycombinator.com ?

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