> The problem, in short, is that the Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Moramarco doesn’t understand what Weev did and instead compared his hacking to “blowing up a nuclear plant in New Jersey.” He said:
>> We have a case here where…[the defense] is arguing that this was completely open to everyone. But you look at the testimony of Daniel Spitler and the steps he had to take to get to this wide open Web and I’m flabbergasted that this could be called anything other than a hack. He had to download the entire iOS system on his computer. He had to decrypt it. He had to do all sorts of things—I don’t even understand what they are.
Wow.
When a prosecutor is not only technically illiterate, but proud of their illiteracy, they should be disbarred.
In my opinion, this individual's statement makes them sound like a self-aggrandizing, grade-A asshole -- the prosecutorial equivalent of an ambulance chaser with a low-def ad on late night TV and a strip-mall office that smells like moldy carpet.
When a prosecutor is not only technically illiterate, but proud of their illiteracy, they should be disbarred.
By that logic, when a programmer is illiterate with regards to the law, they should be barred from programming forever if they make an app/SaaS/whatever that breaks any law, any where, for whatever reason.
Prosecutors, especially US Attorneys, are self-aggrandizing, attention-seeking political whores, but technical illiteracy by itself is not a justification for disbarring them from the practice of law.
Weev's attorney can, and should, [edit (past tense)]have sought[/edit] Moramarco's removal from the case based on his statements. Prosecutor's don't need to be fully technically literate when it comes to prosecuting a crime, but they do need to at least understand the basic details in order to maintain their ethical obligations to their position, the court, and the defendant.
>> By that logic, when a programmer is illiterate with regards to the law, they should be barred from programming forever if they make an app/SaaS/whatever that breaks any law, any where, for whatever reason.
a lawyer exists to defend and interpret law. which this guy is arguably incapable of, given his elementary knowledge of really simple technical principles.
that is not the job of a software engineer. i'm not sure your analogy holds water.
It is not a lawyer's job to understand technology; it is the lawyer's job to understand the law. The lawyer understood the law and the technicalities of the law just fine--the problem is that he admits that he may not understand some, most, or all of the technology at issue in weev's case.
> need to at least understand the basic details in order to maintain their ethical obligations to their position, the court, and the defendant.
So, if he didn't do this, and knew he didn't do it, couldn't one argue that he should be disbarred, or at least be subjected to some sort of professional sanction?
Disbarment? No. Sanctions? maybe. It depends on how relevant the misunderstanding was to the actual prosecution of the case. While the prosecutor was very technically illiterate, based on available records that illiteracy wasn't relevant to the elements of the crime itself, namely that he "impersonated" (within the meaning of the law) someone else's identity to access protected information.
The id theft charge is the biggie here--it actually imposes more criminal time than the underlying offense itself, because as other posters have noted it changed a misdemeanor to a felony.
I'd argue that it becomes a pretty relevant misunderstanding when an innocent man (as far as the accusations go) sits in prison for a year. If someone can't practice law effectively (such as if they erroneously prosecute people for crimes they did not commit), then their ability to practice becomes a danger to society.
Yeah, when the state can't even articulate the act, much less why it is wrong, it is really hard to respect their jurisprudence.
EDIT:
And before anyone counters with "Whether you respect it or not, it's the law (and they have the power to enforce it).", do consider that such an argument is basically saying that the rule of law boils down to men with guns.
I don't think that that is either noble or desirable--for a civilization, we must do better.
The rule of law boils down to men with guns listening to the judgment of twelve of the most ordinary people that can be found. If you're unlikable, or if you're acting outside the social norms, that creates a problem for you.
In this country, the citizens have guns too. This is actually a pretty big reason for why the police are so heavily militarized here as compared to gun-prohibitionist nations like France or Germany.
But the law does not boil down to men with guns--it boils down to our voluntary consent to live by the laws by choosing to live here (immigrants) or to remain here (everyone else) as opposed to somewhere else, like the wonderfully law-free nation of Somalia.
This hack didn't rely on doing anything with iOS other than sniffing the traffic iOS sent to AT&T. I think what they were attempting to say was that Xcode's iOS simulator may've been employed.
Another interesting fact: weev did not actually write or run the script that harvested the data, or talk to AT&T's servers. That was all Daniel "JacksonBrown" Spitler, who was sentenced to 18 months of probation. weev simply shared the list of harvested data with Gawker, under the condition that it be redacted if published, as proof that the leak had occurred.
Think about that; the guy who actually did the hacking got probation. The guy who simply alerted the media to the hacking got 41 months.
Source: I am Nick "Rucas" Price, member of Goatse Security, and I am mentioned numerous times in the federal criminal complaint.
> Should a prosecutor be allowed to prosecute a case if he doesn't understand the actions taken by the prosecuted?
Yes.
There's no reason a prosecutor needs to understand the details of exploit development in order to prosecute a case related to it. A hyperbolic comparison would be to claim a prosecutor needs to be able to build a nuke if they were to prosecute someone who built one in their garage. A more apt comparison might be:
Suppose Weev was the first person to discover bleach+ammonia = toxic gas. The prosecution is trying to demonstrate that this was done intentionally, using techniques that are well beyond the average person. An equivalent quote would be
> "He had to purify the ammonia. He had to use a centrifuge. He had to do all sorts of things—I don’t even understand what they are."
But if he doesn't know what a centrifuge is, then how does he know that most people wouldn't know how to use one? Maybe he's an outlier...
Also, I don't think anyone is saying the prosecutor should be an expert at infosec, but he should at least know enough about the supposed crimes committed to know whether or not they are crimes.
To extend your nuke analogy, he needn't know how to build a nuke, but he should know or learn what a nuke is and he should know or have someone tell him whether the garage nuke was actually a nuke and, if so, how dangerous it was.
So kind of like a science fair student that builds a nuclear reactor by using the material from a smoke detector, and sensitive enough test equipment to demonstrate that a micro chain reaction took place? To someone with appropriate knowledge, this would be nothing special -- but to the general public, "Nuclear Reactor!!! Lock him up!!!"
Shouldn't a prosecutor either recuse themselves, or at least consult subject-matter experts before proceeding with a prosecution over a subject about which they admittedly have insufficient knowledge? Is that not part of a lawyer's or at least a prosecutor's code of professional conduct?
It is, though defense attorneys and judges rarely call them on this since it is a bridge-burner. Once you do this, you can be pretty sure they're acting within the rules/ethical obligations in future dealings, but you're also less likely to get good deals from them since they're much less willing to negotiate. This matters since most criminal defendants actually are guilty (and admit it!) and don't want to go to trial.
That seems like an unfair extrapolation of one (possibly out of context) quote.
I don't think what Weev is accused of doing should be a jailable offense, but I also don't think the prosecutor (apparently!) not understanding what's involved in scripting a web scraper somehow proves it either way.
Weev is not a good guy imo. I'm not even sure I prefer him outside of prison walls for some of his past actions (although of course the solitary stuff is outrageous).
But: He really must be acquitted for the actions he is now in jail for. There is just no way this should ever be punishable. Otherwise it would set a very bad precedent for corporation bullying of people that uncover negligence when it comes to customer security.
Criminal courts should not evaluate whether accused is good guy or a bad guy. The only possible exception is when the guy is found guilty and court is looking for sentence.
Courts should evaluate whether the guy broke the law and whether the law is consistent with constitution. His trolling activities and personality should not play much role when determining guilt.
Criminal courts aren't allowed to evaluate whether the defendant is good or bad. It's actually one of the basic federal rules of evidence. Character evidence is relevant and admissible only if the defense first makes the defendant's character a part of the defense.
Courts should evaluate...whether the law is consistent with constitution.
This seems to be a big misunderstanding in the tech world. Courts already do make sure laws are consistent with the Constitution; that is one of their primary jobs. But they primarily do this when the law is challenged--usually when it is first introduced or on its first application to a novel set of facts. The courts do not re-determine the constitutionality of a law every time a criminal case proceeds, and especially not when the constitutionality of the law has already been addressed in prior cases.
> I'm not even sure I prefer him outside of prison walls for some of his past actions
I don't know what he did (heard his name for the first time today) but if it weren't crimes then he definitely should be 'outside of prison walls'. No matter how much you don't like him or how much his actions made you feel bad.
As abhorrent as his personality may be, there is no reason to lock him up. Prison is not a place to just put in everyone you find disagreeable, although most governments would likely insist against that.
Actually, prison is exactly the type of place we invented for the sole purpose of putting people we find disagreeable. We create laws to attempt to define disagreeable behavior and intentionally keep them vague enough that if someone gets out of line we can lock them up.
> and intentionally keep them vague enough that if someone gets out of line we can lock them up.
(Is this a joke? I honestly can't tell.)
That may be what you'd expect in a despotic regime, but in a free country (which is what the US aspires to be), laws cannot be vague, and vagueness is grounds for a law to be found unconstitutional on its face. Individuals must have adequate notice as to what conduct constitutes a crime and what doesn't. Otherwise it's impossible to know if what you're doing is legal or not, and you can find yourself thrown in prison just for being unpopular.
Our prisons are primarily filled with unpopular people. We tend to refer to them as minorities. Some specific examples off the top of my head of intentionally vague law is when there's purely subjective decisions as to whether a crime is just a "regular" crime or a "hate crime." There also seems to be a lot of ambiguity around what exactly constitutes copyright infringement or the legal vs illegal varieties of hacking.
Agreed, our prisons are full of unpopular people (though that's kind of circular, because being in prison makes you unpopular).
Good point about minorities, though that's largely because of uneven enforcement of laws (e.g. blacks tend to receive harsher sentences, and are more likely to be busted for minor drug use) and arbitrary laws that are more likely to affect them (e.g. crack cocaine being treated way more harshly than powder cocain). It's not because the laws are vague (not to imply that that makes this acceptable) since vagueness is way for a law to be struck down. For example, vagueness is one of the primary arguments being made in Weev's case against the CFAA. (Don't know enough about hate crimes to comment, and copyright infringement is mainly a civil, not criminal, matter.)
He does his best to ruin people's lives and to destroy their spirits for fun.
he's not just disagreeable, he's a shitty human being who is exactly where he belongs.
He's just there for the wrong reasons.
I hope he grows up and changes, but all currently available evidence is that he'll never grow up. So fuck him. And fuck people like you who mischaracterize his malicious campaigns as merely being 'disagreeable'.
I hope that he targets the people you love next time he gets out. Then maybe you'll realize what an utterly worthless sack of shit you're supporting.
I hope that he targets the people you love next time he gets out. Then maybe you'll realize what an utterly worthless sack of shit you're supporting.
Clearly you're not clouded by emotion in any way. I've been systemically targeted by trolls years ago, I have some experiences. Not as extreme as what weev may have done, but then again I didn't post much personally identifiable information.
Can't say it's something to throw people in jail over, though it depends on severity, certainly.
The article conveniently leaves out that he was convicted on one count of identify fraud in addition to the CFAA count: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/11/att-hacker-found-gu..., by a jury. If it had just been the CFAA count, he would've gotten just a misdemeanor.
You conveniently leave out that "identity fraud" was setting his browser User Agent string to say "iPad". Which Safari does, via the "Develop" menu, right out of the box. This distinction is meaningless and laughable.
shit so when I use the '-U' on wget I am also committing identity fraud? Did gnu set me up for this? If I call something a spade which clearly not a spade, am I committing identity fraud? I am so confused now.
> Weev needs to be in prison for attempting to blackmail and extort a company over private consumer information.
Can you back that up? I thought that Weev joked with friends about doing that but never took it anywhere or did anything that I would regard even as "attempting" to blackmail or extort instead just told Gawker.
Would be interested if there is something but in the absence of further information my view is that all these charges should probably be dropped.
Edit: From what I've read he isn't a good guy and there may have been a case to charge him on unrelated matter (stalking/harassment) but he should still go free on this stuff.
> Can you back that up? I thought that Weev joked with friends about doing that but never took it anywhere or did anything that I would regard even as "attempting" to blackmail or extort instead just told Gawker.
There are words on an IRC transcript. Whether those words constitute a "joke" is a matter of interpretation, and that's something we leave up to juries. For various practical reasons, we do not just trust criminal defendants when they say they are "joking." Weev's jury, which returned a verdict after just a few hours, apparently did not think he was joking.
At the end of the day, this is the sort of thing that got Weev convicted, not some "corrupt prosecutor." If you do something at the edge of the law, and do it in a way where a jury of your peers is likely to find you unsympathetic or not understand what you did, you're going to have a bad time. Maybe this isn't fair, but it's a natural property of criminal law systems based on jury trials. The law isn't enforced by robots, it's enforced by people, and if people don't like you, that diminishes your odds.
Whether a joke or a real suggestion there seems to be nothing suggesting it was taken forwards and it isn't like they didn't get chance to go through with something because the police knocked down the door that minute.
Without further evidence of any concrete action I don't see how it could be regarded as an "attempt" at anything. That he was convicted on the basis of that[0] strikes me as a failure of the system (including the prosecutor, the court and the jury) and that hopefully an appeals court would correct the error.
[0] Assuming that was the extent of the evidence in this aspect as there may be other evidence of which I am not aware.
No, I can't back it up offhand (nor do I care to go to the trouble). I'm more pointing out that I wish the case would have been of that nature (because it was definitely discussed to some degree, threatening, releasing to gawker, etc) and not on the trumped up "hacking" charges.
No problem, I am genuinely interested if there is more to the blackmail allegation than the snippet of IRC logs discussing it. Obviously it was released to Gawker but I hadn't seen anything indicating a threat of any kind was actually made and the release to Gawker appears to me specifically NOT making a blackmail attempt (assuming no such threat was actually made).
>> This would be as similar to blowing up a nuclear plant in New Jersey only if the nuclear plant were stupid enough to put a button on their website – hidden, obviously, through a feat of minor obfuscation – that said “Press Here To Blow Up Nuclear Plant.”
Not having experience in nuclear plants, I would not be surprised to learn that there's a lever/button/etc. that would destroy the plant if pressed at the wrong time. Maybe the button to remove all the control rods or something. Airplanes, cars, computers all have a similar button (e.g. steering wheel, rm -rf, etc.). In any case, it's not obvious to me that a power plant couldn't be destroyed by someone actively trying to do so, especially if that person thinks he's special because he can see through the "minor obfuscation".
So I think this was a really bad analogy.
I don't know enough about weev to have an informed opinion.
This article and others about Weev seem convinced that his sentence is attributable to his unpleasant personality and his previous malice on the net.
In the absence of evidence that this was part of the judge's sentence, this seems like speculation. Which leaves the one real question: whether the sentence is fair independent of Weev's character.
The sentence strikes me as certainly on the heavy end of the spectrum, but not so outside the bounds of what's just that I feel some grave injustice has been visited upon him.
This is ridiculous. We have a legal system where murderers like George Zimmerman get away for ridiculous defense like "following someone with a gun is not illegal", "shooting is not illegal" etc. But downloading iOS is illegal?
We are hounding people like Aaron Swartz & Weev and threatening them with 30 yrs in jail time for downloading a few files with wget.
I guess hackers should shoot a computer with a gun after hacking and use affluenza in their defense to get away. /s
>>>I guess hackers should shoot a computer with a gun after hacking and use affluenza in their defense to get away.
While I realize this is sarcastic, there's a huge reason I stopped hacking into systems. I know its a felony, I know the government has a hard-on for making examples out of people they catch breaking into systems or doing anything they deem mildly illegal. To me, it's not worth it to test the government and try to show them the error of their ways. He was playing with fire and he knew it.
On the bright side, he's still getting what he wants. He's getting plenty of people coming to his defense. His security company is getting a lot of exposure, and people are clamoring for a review of the law his was prosecuted under. His cost is going to be spending three years in jail and having to put that he's been convicted of a felony on every job application until he retires.
If you asked him if it was worth it now, what do you think he would say?
I take it as a sign that our court systems are failing when a judge can jail someone for crimes that has admitted to not even understanding. Whether he's a good guy or not, that's ridiculous.
[01:33] <weev> what kind of furry bluefox are you?
[01:33] <weev> i have a giant weevil costume
[01:33] <weev> with fawn horns
[01:33] <weev> to symbolize my malevolence
>> We have a case here where…[the defense] is arguing that this was completely open to everyone. But you look at the testimony of Daniel Spitler and the steps he had to take to get to this wide open Web and I’m flabbergasted that this could be called anything other than a hack. He had to download the entire iOS system on his computer. He had to decrypt it. He had to do all sorts of things—I don’t even understand what they are.
Wow.
When a prosecutor is not only technically illiterate, but proud of their illiteracy, they should be disbarred.
In my opinion, this individual's statement makes them sound like a self-aggrandizing, grade-A asshole -- the prosecutorial equivalent of an ambulance chaser with a low-def ad on late night TV and a strip-mall office that smells like moldy carpet.