Is Weev Still In Jail Because the Government Doesn't Understand What Hacking Is? 246
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Last March, weev, the notorious internet troll who seems to be equally celebrated and reviled, was convicted of accessing a computer without authorization and identity fraud, and sentenced to serve 41 months in prison.'He had to decrypt and decode, and do all of these things I don't even understand,' Assistant US Attorney Glenn Moramarco argued. Here, on a Wednesday morning in Philadelphia, before a packed courtroom, the federal prosecution argued that a hacker should spend three and a half years in prison for committing a crime it couldn't fully comprehend. Previously, Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University and weev's defense attorney, had argued first and foremost that there was no criminal hacking to speak of. According to Kerr, what weev and Daniel Spitler (who pleaded guilty to avoid jail time) had done while working as an outfit called Goatse Security was entirely legal, even though it embarrassed public officials and some of the country's biggest corporations."
No. (Score:1, Informative)
He's in jail because he accessed a crapload of records from ATT he shouldn't have.
Not to say ATT shouldn't have used better security, mind you, but thems the breaks. It's not like the end point he found was big P public. He found it snooping on the traffic from an ipad during sign up.
Further more instead of going to ATT, he went to Gawker first.
So. No.
Its due to the courts' zeal for punishment (Score:3, Informative)
...particularly for punishing small fries who get in the way of large corporate interests and other big shots.
Along the same lines, we can ask why 'Bidder 70' went to jail [billmoyers.com] for stopping the illegal sale of public land.
Re: No. (Score:5, Informative)
Any public URL that is unencrypted is not a secret. Snooping on plaintext is not snooping at all. And he had no legal requirement to notify AT&T first. Besides, even if he had, they don't care about security until it goes viral. I notified them of a information leak on their iOS translation app that allowed other apps access to your translations and location data. Not only were they unable to figure out who was responsible for the app, they ultimately told me to call Apple. I tried the support for the app as well as customer service. I email their PR rep too. Zero response.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)