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."
Re:Its due to the courts' zeal for punishment (Score:3, Interesting)
and well..
quite frankly due to the prosecutor not understanding what he had been doing it's just about punishing for joking around. it should be illegal to prosecute something you can't understand. "I don't know what he did but he sure looks guilty, right!? you must convict!".
circa 1997 this happened to me, sort of. ran a traceroute on the wrong night to see where my emails were routed through(our school mandated the use of an internal email system where server wasn't internal and there was no encryption on the email clients(email client was mandated to be a certain windows email reader). now of course I had my machine full of warez(games and early music warez), winnukes, jolt of the day etc(and had winnuked some people so not totally innocent really of everything).
but what shocked me was the police interrogation, because they tried to make me sign something I had not said, because they did not understand the claims made by the "victim"(city) were impossible to have happened from my actions(and claiming shit like me crashing hospital internal network, hopping a supposed airgap and other stuff that I did not do, they just had some internal meltdown of the windows servers routing the traffic on the same day). the way the interrogation went was "you know what you did, tell us" and 16 year old me going "what the fuck dudes?".
originally they wanted me to confess to something technically impossible and it took them nearly 2 years to figure out that they did not know what to charge me with(and for the prosecutor to deem the investigation incompetently done and drop it, and it cost the state quite a lot for nothing...). I mean, the
posting anon but it's not too hard to figure out who this is for those who know.
anyway, doesn't matter which western country you live in always check what the coppers want you to sign and ask the fuckers to rewrite it to match what you actually said. after that ordeal I was convinced 20-30% of "solved" crimes are just pinned on some druggies in withdrawal who don't read what they sign.
Re: No. (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's take this idea to an extreme scenario, albeit one that's not too improbable. For a very long time, a nuclear launch code was actually '00000000.' Let's say some hacker had accessed their network, determined this was the case, and made all of the machines with displays on the network say 'Change the fucking password before you doom us all, you stupid fuckwits.' Who are you going to be angry at, the hacker who intercepted their network, or the party that ignored their responsibility in protecting something that could have potentially destroyed civilization as we know it?