For the purposes of this blog, I'll only reference them by their title. If anyone was so inclined I'm sure with a little legwork you could determine the names of the people involved, but I won't publish them here.
the meeting was almost a week after that, and the first meeting was essentially everything I talked about in my post titled "The Action" (most recently previous post).
The entire purpose of this meeting, which was grilled into me the entire time I was sitting there explaining to the Associate Dean and CIO was to determine my intentions. I believe it was made clear, and would reflect on the official records held by Mohawk College, that the intention was not malicious, which is true. Afterwards, I was asked when my exams were and that another meeting would be set to try and determine, more or less, what they would do with me, while they consult in private with eachother (I presume).
I want to mention, and though this doesn't really have anything to do with the story, when I was walking into that room, I was extremely nervous and I could only think that this could go one of two ways: either extremely good, they'll thank me for helping them and almost offer me a job... or they'll be very pissed off. obviously the second was closer to the truth.
Just my thoughts walking in.
Moving right along, a week or so goes by and I write my exams. on the day of my final exam, the Associate Dean makes an appointment after my final exam to discuss my "punishment" or whatever. After writing my last exam, I waited around for a little while in the school and had a very brief (20 minutes maybe) meeting where they basically said: 'because of your actions, we've determined you've hacked our computers and the punishment for hacking is suspension' ... not a direct quote but more or less, that was the gyst of the meeting. They gave me my copy, in writing of the judgement, and within 15 minutes had cancelled all of my access to just about everything college-related.
This is a little out of the scope of what I wanted to cover here, but if you head over to Mohawk's webpage and google "know your rights" and look up the IT Security policy, you'll find two sections in the same document that define Hacking. I challenge anyone reading this, to contort their definitions in their entirety (if you make one fit, you have to make the whole sentence fit, not just a part of the definition) to the actions of 'submitting unexpected information to a webpage' (more or less) I would honestly be interested in HOW someone could deduce that any of those rules were broken from my actions....
I'll say this upfront, some of the rules, if you cut them off in the middle, would fit. like "misrepresenting yourself or your computer" ... okay, yeah, I guess... but then the rule finishes with "for the purposes of..." to the end of something that completely doesn't apply.
anyways. I'd quote the rules here, but honestly, it's too much work to get the formatting correct, considering how they published the PDFs...
Anyone who will take the time to read Mohawk's official rules (of which I've obtained copies of the versions that apply RIGHT NOW, in case they get wise and decide to update them to include actions like what I've done), will understand, they DON'T apply to me. they cite that I broke the ITSCC (IT Security) policy, and the student behavior policy. I can't see how either could have been broken.
To be fair, there is a clause in the Student Behavior policy that states that any activity that interferes with the operation of the MSA is punishable, or something, but if they were to punish me under those rules, they would have had to have a much more complete investigation, as stipulated by the policy itself... Additionally, I submit that I did not interfere with the NORMAL operation of the MSA, since neither the Vote was being run by the MSA (it did have the MSA's name and logo, but was being run by the IT dept.), nor was the Vote part of a NORMAL MSA function. There are more points in this point that I could argue, but I'll let that lie.
As for the judgement, I decided on an appeal, which deserves a post in itself, though, I expect it will be a short one. I'll hopefully get around to typing that up tomorrow.
See you then.
