Why Microsoft was wrong to silence Bing cashback whistleblower

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 11 November 2009 14:41

Your IT - Home IT

So why did he withdraw that post? The letter he received from a law firm representing Microsoft is the answer. You can read the letter in full here but it basically states that Meghani was operating web pages which "are violating Microsoft's rights".

It also claims that Meghani was "providing information directing users how to misuse the Microsoft Bing Cashback program through unuathorized technical means" which does not seem to tie in with the "not going to explain" statement in the posting at the heart of all this.

Meghani says that the "purpose of my post was to show an implementation problem, not to encourage defrauding Microsoft" and that the information he did post was "obvious to anyone reading their documentation".

He also admits that he doesn't like dealing with lawyers and so opted to comply with the takedown request. "I will still write a “non-technical” post on all the problems I see with Bing Cashback in the next few days" a niggled Meghani writes.

So what exactly is going on here? Usually the big legal guns are reserved for the real bad guys, and both Microsoft and its lawyers must have know Meghani would go public with this letter and so fan the flames of a bad media fire storm.

I suspect that a couple of things come into play here: firstly, Meghani made the mistake of admitting to the misuse of the Cashback scheme in order to illegally place a couple of thousand dollars in his account.

Microsoft argues, with some hefty legal justification, that this amounts to a violation of the US Federal Computer Fraud & Abuse Act as well as (undisclosed) common law principles under state law.

It seems to me that Microsoft allowed for the fact that the alleged fraud was committed as part of a vulnerability exposure as that lawyers letter states the company "would genuinely like to resolve this matter without the need for any enforcement action".

So, has Microsoft been guilty of simply trying to cover its own back, or is there more to it than that? More on page 3...

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