Weev, wget, & Rape Culture

[emceeaich]

Andy Baio on Weev, who has been sentenced to 41 months in the Federal pen for embarrassing AT&T:

waxpancake: Weev terrorized people online for years without legal consequences, but poking at a phone company gets him jail time. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/att-hacker-gets-3-years/

waxpancake: I’m sure Kathy Sierra and Weev’s other targets would be happy to see him behind bars, but not for this. wget is not a crime.

Weev's admitted to helping chase Kathy Sierra offline and his attacks on LJ are probably well known to anyone spending any time in the trenches there.

I wonder if the AT&T prosecution is the DOJ trying to find something to go after him on. The problem with that is that the charge, enumerating a list of URLs, makes for bad precedent. You could make anyone a felon with a single XSS attack.

Why wasn't Weev charged in relation to threats against Kathy Sierra or his attacks on LJ? Because we've made embarrassing the powerful an implicit crime through selective enforcement of laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and our culture continues to ignore threats against women and communities of women.

Comments

[judith_s]

When did Weev become one of the "security researchers who have been charged with serious computer crimes under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act"? I thought he was a troll.

[emceeaich]

He is a troll, but finding the hole in AT&T is security research.

[judith_s]

I disagree. Finding & exploiting a security loophole, and then announcing it on/b/ and Gawker doesn't qualify as security research.

[azurelunatic]

I think finding and testing qualifies, but the rest, really not so much.

[azurelunatic]

At this point, I really can't care much about the method of his removal from society. I had no idea that he was the one terrifying Kathy Sierra, but so much makes sense in retrospect.

I hope our culture improves and this isn't used as precedent for more Aaron problems, but he needed to be locked up five years ago.

[emceeaich]

I don't disagree that he needed to face the music over what he had been doing to Sierra and others. Ask people who saw me in the hours after the WisCon troll managed to get every shitstain on Reddit laughing at my family.

But I'm uncomfortable that the charge that was pursued against weev was embarrassing a corporation. The problem with the CFAA is that anyone who has been around computers could be charged under it.

I want a justice system, not a US-attorney-acting-out-of-whim-and-political-gain system.

[brainwane]

Thank you for writing this. I've been linking to it.