Good to see the government required to follow the law on on venue. Disappointing the case is about someone who seems to be a classic sociopath, who is smart, manipulative, superficially charming, and likes to make people suffer on the internet.
“Couldn’t have happened to a worse guy,” as the saying goes?
Any bets on how long until he picks on someone willing to fight back and cops a legit criminal-harassment conviction?
I assume he can be retried in a more appropriate venue? I suppose the feds won’t get the judge they wanted next time around; they obviously picked New Jersey for a reason.
Weev is still a dickhead and a douchebag but this is not the thing he should go to jail for good developement for security researchers
Despite what the EFF calls it, I dunno if intentionally exploiting a security flaw to expose 100k iPad users’ data and then send it to Gawker should be considered “good development”.
It sounds like he’s done plenty of things that could have gotten him sent to jail, previously. But those were the sorts of activities that law enforcement has difficulty with investigating, and for which prosecutors have difficulty securing convictions. So ironically they went after him for the thing he publicly admitted to because it wasn’t actually illegal. If they decide not to re-prosecute him for this in a different venue, they might keep a close enough eye on him that they can catch him in the act harassing someone, but I rather doubt it, somehow.
So, who’s going to post some GNAA copypasta and disguised Goatse links to mark the occasion?
It’s the right decision, legally speaking, but couldn’t we at least have someone punch him in the face a few times?
I can think of much worse things that could have been done with the information than sending it to a news outlet.
Gizmodo is a news outlet in the same sense as a sewer pipe.
He said he had been in solitary. What do y’want, Dick Cheney to water board him?
on GIF: God dog, is that the Federal lockup in Houston?,
So… you would have preferred that the information have gone somewhere worse, then. Got it.
Considering all the other sources of bullshit that call themselves news outlets, that’s not really an insult.
Oh, OK then. I wonder if he’ll have rethought his persona at all?
Call me a Luddite, but I would have preferred that he not intentionally hack and slurp down the personal data of 100,000+ AT&T customers, personally.
If he could do it, you can be sure the NSA was already doing it too. At least he got that specific hole plugged.
Well, no, the NSA wasn’t sending folks’ personal iPad data to Gawker for lulz, like weev did. Weev didn’t “get that hole plugged”. It was plugged after his troll squad had their fun.
I’m sure AT&T was all over fixing that issue long before he found it and told people about it.
Also, calling “changing some characters in a public URL” a “hack” is a lot less accurate than calling Gizmodo a news outlet.
Personally, I would have preferred if someone at AT&T had stopped to think about how they were letting personal data of their customers be accessed through public URLs with absolutely no attempt at authentication. That has to have gone past a lot of eyes in the company just to get the servers and the coding set up for it, and evidently no one thought it was a problem then.
I don’t know anything about the guy or the case (other than what I just read in the ruling). This ruling states that venue was not proper. This means only that the government brought the charge against Defendant in an improper jurisdiction. I presume that they will simply refile in the proper jurisdiction. Although it is possible that the court (in the proper jurisdiction) will dismiss a new charge because of the double jeopardy clause, it is by no means a forgone conclusion in this situation.
So, good news, it is now a bit harder to get dragged into court in a place that has no connections with your actions, bad news, the underlying actions are still considered illegal, and being hailed into federal court as a criminal defendant is (presumably) quite unpleasant no matter where the building is.
