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T O P I C R E V I E W
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fs
Member # 1181
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 posted July 08, 2010 01:08
I know, it's old news, happening back in June. But now he's out on bond and written a really long essay on his current predicament.
I put it here, rather than just plain old news, because there's virtually no end of things to argue about in that post. Israel/Palestine, drug laws, free speech, the ethics of full disclosure...
(On a side note, I do think "Goatse" is a brilliant name for a security company.)
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Ashitaka
Member # 4924
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posted July 08, 2010 02:27
I'm blocked from following that link at work and now my IT manager probably thinks I was trying to follow, you know, "that link".
I get the ambarrassing, BLOCK page , no looking at "s" "e" "x" at work thing.
ok, that is paraphrasing.
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GrumpySteen
Member # 170
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posted July 08, 2010 02:39
Yeah... I don't think I would trust much of what "Weev" says now that he's desperate for people to like him and help him. He's given interviews that show a rather less flattering side:
I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money ... I make people afraid for their lives ... Trolling is basically Internet eugenics ... I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards ... We need to put these people in the oven!
The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?
But now that he's been caught with drugs and faces fairly minor charges that might land his ass in jail for a month or two, he's crying like a baby that wants his mommy and begging the very people that he wanted to put into "the oven" for help.
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fs
Member # 1181
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posted July 08, 2010 04:48
Some random thoughts:
1. It seems a little like arresting Al Capone for tax evasion, if the warrant was actually looking for evidence of either criminal computer intrusion (or whatever the kids are calling it these days) or evidence of involvement in hate groups/domestic terrorism, which seem the two likely possibilities.
2. Being a shitty person doesn't mean it's okay to trample on someone's right to be ignorant and offensive. There are plenty of people out there (hint: they vote Republican) that think people like me are pretty shitty, and responsible for the downfall of truth, justice, mom, apple pie, baseball, and the American Way.
3. He's going to have a really hard time getting a decent lawyer if more serious charges than drug possession are levied. Organizations like the ACLU and EFF want cases they can win. Part of their agenda is to form a body of case law and judgments supporting their ideals, and they can't do that by taking on people that are likely to sabotage the case based on things that have nothing to do with the central issue. (Why defend the speech of a drugged up hacker when you can defend the speech of a seventh grade biology teacher? Or why defend the disclosure practices of a drugged up holocaust denier, when you can defend somebody who's never told the New York Times that bloggers should go "in the oven.")
4. If you're going to be controversial in one area you should be squeaky clean in all the rest.
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GrumpySteen
Member # 170
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posted July 08, 2010 09:07
You can be arrested for anything the police find while they're searching for whatever the search warrant specifies so long as they were searching a place that was listed on the warrant where the object of the search could reasonably be expected to be found. That's not a violation of civil liberties. That's the way search warrants work.
I don't think he understands that being the person who publicized the hack is enough to give the police probable cause to believe that records on his computer (or hard drive or micro-SD card) would lead to the people responsible, thus the search warrant and subsequent discovery of his posession.
The only thing in his story that sounds like he's being treated unfairly is the denial of a request for a court appointed attorney. I'm not really sure of what the rules are for approving or denying the use of a public defender are, so I can't say much about that except that the denial appears to only have been in relation to the misdemeanor charge. The felony charges aren't mentioned.
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fs
Member # 1181
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posted July 08, 2010 13:02
quote:
Originally posted by GrumpySteen:
You can be arrested for anything the police find while they're searching for whatever the search warrant specifies so long as they were searching a place that was listed on the warrant where the object of the search could reasonably be expected to be found. That's not a violation of civil liberties. That's the way search warrants work.
Yeah, but arrest is also discretionary. The police could have chosen to ignore the (what sounds like a pretty trivial amount of) drugs, or they could have issued an appearance ticket instead of incarcerating him.
quote:
Originally posted by GrumpySteen:
I don't think he understands that being the person who publicized the hack is enough to give the police probable cause to believe that records on his computer (or hard drive or micro-SD card) would lead to the people responsible, thus the search warrant and subsequent discovery of his posession.
I wouldn't be surprised if they offer to drop the drug charges in return for information about who was responsible.
Or maybe I've been watching too much of The Wire.
quote:
Originally posted by GrumpySteen:
The only thing in his story that sounds like he's being treated unfairly is the denial of a request for a court appointed attorney. I'm not really sure of what the rules are for approving or denying the use of a public defender are, so I can't say much about that except that the denial appears to only have been in relation to the misdemeanor charge. The felony charges aren't mentioned.
I think the rules for a public defender are a) the charges must be felonies and b) you must be unable to pay for your own attorney.
Given public claims like, "As a member of a group of hackers called 'the organization,' which, he says, bring in upward of $10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere," it's not impossible that they think he might be able to afford an attorney. (Assuming that they believed it; to me it sounds like something out of a Dan Brown book.)
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GrumpySteen
Member # 170
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posted July 08, 2010 13:51
fs wrote:
Yeah, but arrest is also discretionary. The police could have chosen to ignore the (what sounds like a pretty trivial amount of) drugs, or they could have issued an appearance ticket instead of incarcerating him.
They could have, but I would bet that he unwisely chose to exercise his right to be ignorant and offensive at the wrong moment.
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fs
Member # 1181
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posted July 08, 2010 14:05
quote:
Originally posted by GrumpySteen:
fs wrote:
Yeah, but arrest is also discretionary. The police could have chosen to ignore the (what sounds like a pretty trivial amount of) drugs, or they could have issued an appearance ticket instead of incarcerating him.
They could have, but I would bet that he unwisely chose to exercise his right to be ignorant and offensive at the wrong moment.
Well, the right to free speech doesn't actually mean the right to speech without consequences.
Which, on a side note, is one of the reasons I think it's important to also protect pseudonymous and anonymous speech. But that's digressing.
I think what it comes down to is that Weev is not likely to garner much sympathy. Even if everything he says is true, and the FBI really is out to get him and grossly inappropriate miscarriages of justice have been enacted, it's hard to feel outraged about it. Like if Fred Phelps and the Westborovians were being hounded by the authorities, I wouldn't be able to muster much sympathy. (Though I bet the Westboro Baptists have made provisions for legal representation.)
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GrumpySteen
Member # 170
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posted July 08, 2010 14:47
Funny you should mention Fred Phelps...
Apparently hacker-boy is either a fan or really likes pretending he is.
I assume that the post is just trolling (although trolling your own blog is rather dumb), but why should we believe he's being honest now when he's shown so many times that he'll lie his ass off for the lulz.
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fs
Member # 1181
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posted July 09, 2010 01:24
Ha. Fred Phelps is my general comparator for obnoxious/offensive/nutball speech. That's a funny link though.
I'm surprised more people aren't interested in talking about the ethics of full disclosure. I thought that would be a point of interest around here.
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GrumpySteen
Member # 170
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posted July 09, 2010 08:04
Unfortunately, this isn't really a good example of full disclosure. It's great that they notified AT&T of the problem, but they then proceeded to use a script to grab information from over 100,000 accounts. That isn't full disclosure nor is it public service or being a security researcher. That is blatant exploitation of a security hole.
As for the ethics...
There are cases where companies have refused to respond to notifications of security issues until the details of an exploit are made public, so full disclosure does have valid, ethical uses.
There are, however, cases where details were made public before companies could respond and sometimes before they were notified. The use of full disclosure in those cases was clearly unethical.
Ultimately, full disclosure is neither ethical nor unethical. It's a tool and, like any tool, it can be used responsibly or irresponsibly.
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