Government right, Ruk’s Blues are his own making
Peter Rukavina, former PEI Government consultant created website he hacked (WSJ photo)
Peter Rukavina betrayed client confidentiality by hacking the government website
Initially we supported the OpenCorporations.org Peter Rukavina’s publication of government corporate data.
The link to the PNP scandal was too delicious not to take a look.
The government response to shut Peter down seemed like big brother was clamping down on freedom of access. We wrote articles and letters in support.
While the PNP scandal is big and needs investigation, the former programmer who built the government site should not have betrayed the trust the Province placed in him.
Looking at the whole picture, we see Peter Rukavina was a major developer for years in the building of the government website. Rukavina acknowledged this earlier but it got lost in the shuffle. The Guardian and Globe and Mail did not report that Rukavina was the contractor who worked for years on this website. We didn’t read that part of the story until this afternoon.
Considering Rukavina’s role in creating the website he hacked, we can’t support him at all. The Province was his client.
Professional ethics should prevent a consultant or other professional from ever using knowledge to expose the client to any public scrutiny or for his own gain or advancement.
Even cool pranks are outside the realm of professional behaviour.
Will clients always have to look over their shoulders worrying that computer consultants have come back, to create problems for them at the least or steal data at the worst?
Computer experts have technological knowledge superior to their clients. They should walk away from projects and never even hint they have looked at the clients data or sites. It’s like having the keys to the door and the safe and coming back just to look around at the bank when no one is there.
The Province was well within their rights to shut Peter down. What he did was not supportable.
Unless Peter was required by law to reveal what he knew, he should take client secrets to his grave. We gave Rukavina an opportunity to comment and this is his reply.
From: Peter Rukavina [mailto:peter@rukavina.net] Sent: December-11-08 5:53 PM To: Stephen Pate Subject: Re: Govt website Hello there,Thank you for your thoughts. I disclosed my earlier relationship with the Government project in my initial post on OpenCorporations (http://ruk.ca/article/5101) I don’t believe an apology is in order: I had no access to “client secrets” and no upper hand. I indexed the contents of a public website, a simple, technically common exercise that requires neither knowledge of the underlying data model, nor the architecture. Regards,Peter
There are extenuating circumstances when people write tell all books, which are suspect but it happens all the time.
Full disclosure by Stephen Pate: we have revealed some of the inside stories while working with the Liberal government of Robert Ghiz for four reasons:
Betrayed promises and attempted to discredit me, says Stephen Pate
1) the Province betrayed the trust we put in them going by attempting to derail the reform of the Disability Support Program which was a personal pre-election promise made to me by Chris LeClair then Robert Ghiz’s Chief of Staff and now Deputy Minister to the Premier;
2) the Province tried to discredit me personally and my role in DSP reform by spreading false stories in the press and in the Legislature and when asked to correct the lies, they refused;
3) the good of social reform for the disabled weighs the problem of breach of trust if any;
and
4) my agreement with Chris LeClair before contracting was that they had confidentiality only as long a contract for services existed plus 30 days.
We all knew going into the arrangement that I was not bound by confidentiality but it was the Province that revealed secrets and refused to correct false impressions they created. It was one of the toughest things of my professional career to disclose what I know but the betrayal by the Province and the need of the public to know out weighed my instincts.
I am guessing you’re not a programmer, but what Mr. Rukavina did doesn’t require any special insider secrets. I could spider your blog to pull out your posts and display them in a different format and display them in a different format, for example, in an hour or so. Its pretty easy.
Darren
December 12, 2008 at 6:28 am
Thanks for your comment.
I can program and ran a shop of C and SQL programmers but I’m not good at it. I understand what is going on but don’t have the attention span to do it. How’s that for honesty.
It’s not what he did, although I suggest most people in the public wouldn’t be able to do it. I asked I few programmers I knew and they didn’t or wouldn’t do it.
The situation is: anyone other than a former employee of the Province or contractor would likely be free to do what Peter did. However, Peter is hacking a former client or employer’s site. Bad form, bad ethics, and perhaps a breach of fiduciary trust with the province.
Call up your employer or top clients today and ask them how they would feel if you came back five years after the relationship ended to extract data from their website, just a little screen scrapper bot though. Most savy people wouldn’t take me up on the dare since the clients would say goodbye farewell adieu to you.
We are expected to show ethics and part of that is keeping away from clients once the relationship ends. If you think you have the right to go back later, put a disclaimer on all your quotes and contracts telling clients in advance “I might run processes on your webscreens like Google later on if I like.” That would be the ethical thing to do. Then the client can say – cool or forget it.
disabilityalert
December 12, 2008 at 5:59 pm
As to running bots on this site or any other site, the information on all our sites is copyright by PEI Disability Alert or on my personal sites by Stephen Pate. You are not authorized to re-print without my permission, which so far we have not withheld. You cannot reprint the sites in whole or in part, nor may you print the information in anyway that distorts compromises or otherwises changes the intent of the copyright holders unless it is to parody the sites, which is a valid form of free speech in the USA if not in Canada.
We got our come-uppance yesterday when we re-printed the Globe article and then read their copyright notice.Oops they only allow the headline and link to their site. It’s their copyright and they make the rules. The doctrine of fair use would allow anyone to reprint brief excerpts for commentart, criticism, educational and other valid purposes. A quick edit and we came within their rules of permission.
Cheers, Stephen Pate
disabilityalert
December 12, 2008 at 6:21 pm
[...] the Guardian comment I pointed to discussions on the topic at CEO Blues and Liberal Millionaires Club, without using HTML [...]
Black Friday at the Guardian « Liberal Millionaires Club
December 12, 2008 at 9:22 pm
[...] the Guardian comment I pointed to discussions on the topic at CEO Blues and Liberal Millionaires Club, without using HTML [...]
Black Friday at the Guardian « NJN Network
December 12, 2008 at 10:50 pm
[...] I didn’t use the word “unethical”, simply withdrawing previously published support based on professional ethical standards in the article Government’s right, Ruk’s Blues are of his own making [...]
Stirring up the ethical hornet’s nest « Liberal Millionaires Club
December 13, 2008 at 4:37 pm
[...] I didn’t use the word “unethical”, simply withdrawing previously published support based on professional ethical standards in the article Government’s right, Ruk’s Blues are of his own making [...]
Stirring up the ethical hornet’s nest « NJN Network
December 13, 2008 at 4:43 pm
This is a strangely prissy stand you seem to be taking. Even if the coding knowledge Peter used had been proprietary and either of monetary or strategic value, Peter did not use it for a commercial purpose or make it any more widely available to others than it already was. What’s proprietary to the government, furthermore, is proprietary to the people of PEI, on whose behalf and authority it supposedly acts every time and in every way it acts at all. The government is not just “a client,” in other words, and neither is the disposition of legal records–required by law to be public–just any kind of information which relates to just any kind of job one performs under contract. If you want to talk about something that rises to the standard of ethics, consider if the previously inconvenient-to-access data in question had been about the number of citizens killed by government administered vaccinations; or numbers of civilians killed by operations in Afghanistan. If you inflate the moral significance of Peter’s coding and publishing of the Web site it looks a lot more like whistle-blowing than a violation of the public trust–which is what customer disservice or betrayal gets called when the customer is the government.
oliver
December 13, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Thanks for your comment. For more of my logic see Stirring up the ethical hornets nest
disabilityalert
December 14, 2008 at 1:47 am
[...] the Guardian comment I pointed to discussions on the topic at CEO Blues and Liberal Millionaires Club, without using HTML [...]
Black Friday at the Guardian | NJN Network
March 29, 2009 at 8:19 am