How police found Twitter user accused of sending seizure-triggering GIF

Not that it matters much, but a SIM card has an ICCID, and a (GSM) phone has an IMEI. ESN is a phone identifier, for CDMA phones.

Status epileptics can definitely be fatal. Epileptics are at serious risk of death from seizures or seizure-related injury so I would not be so dismissive of the risk.

> More than 40 Twitter users sent similar strobes to Mr. Eichenwald after they realized they could trigger seizures, he tweeted Friday.

I'm not suggesting that these people shouldn't be charged with some sort of crime, regardless of whether or not they can prove that Eichenwald had a seizure (which I have my doubts about). There's a precedent set that things like lasers shined at pilots eyes are gone after regardless of whether or not it causes a crash.

However, while not condoning these peoples' alleged actions, I can understand why this guy attracts a lot of derision online. Eichenwald appears to be a really scummy character. Google his name and "child p*rn" just for starters. There appears to be a lot of wild stuff there about a big time shady payoff to a site he was "researching".

He also recently appears to be becoming mentally unhinged. He recently went on Tucker Carlson's show and gave a serious repeated accusation about Trump being hospitalized in a mental institution that he later claimed was a joke.

Should be a fascinating legal case to follow if it goes to trial.

What happens if some 10 year old in say Russia, for example (lol), used Bitcoin he made from a few minutes of mining in the very early days of Bitcoin, to purchase a black hat SEO campaign, spamming social networks like Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit with a click-baity title and purchased upvotes/likes/retweets, spreading a gif like this across US social networks. Would our law enforcement convince, or manually penetrate the networks of the black hat SEO service spending possibly millions of dollars to maybe track down this 10 year old, to find out they have no jurisdiction over him? What if someone had an unsecured hotspot on their phone and local LE accused the person who owned the phone of this?

Are local LE's capable of deciphering the possibly extremely technical misdirections one could easily employ? What if someone reads WikiLeaks, and used one of the exposed zero day exploits to frame a mobile phone user of this. What if someone's friend knows their WiFi password and does the same thing, spoofing the owners Mac address?

What prevents a 10 year old kid from sending anyone they dislike to court for who knows how long, requiring them to amass legal fees to defend themselves. What happens if one of the enormous number of people who have RAT's from malware on their computer from being set up in this manner?

What if someone creates their own image hosting server, and they swap all the images hosted, out for this gif? What happens if someone hacks said img hoster and does the same? What if it is a massive free, fast image hoster, and they are hacked and this happens? If the precident dictates that this could potentially kill people, what standards of security should image hosters be held to? Should they be required to pay for the same annual audits companies who handle credit card info do? Or should they be held to the standards of government contractors? Seems like they are effectively claiming the security of image hosters is an order of magnitude more vital than any other company. What if a kid uses the WikiLeaks zerodays which were purposely not exposed by the CIA, provided the entry for this 'prankster'? Can any potential victims sue the government.

Since we've established that feelings matter, how is a gif like this different then offending someone to an absurd degree? I've seen several articles from multiple news sources from different countries, detailing the enforcement of hate speech crimes; for example, Western countries making it illegal to speak out against islam? Are offenses of those nature subject to similar accountibility? Are law enforcement agencies equipped well enough to be certain that no misdirection or projection of the actions onto another was utilized?

Obviously one could go on for eternity like this. Making it simple for anyone with Google to lock someone up who they dislike. Seems to me that a person who is susceptible to these triggers, should find a solution on their end to somehow inhibit the effectiveness of such weapons. If all jurisdictions were to take this seriously, whether it's a 'meme' charge or attempted murder, one could backlog an entire countries legal system for years for a small sum of money. Tbh, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of, and the few comments I read, are equally ignorant.

What if, the defendant in op's story denies the accusations. What if his friend did it from his phone while he was sleeping, and never told a soul? Good luck using the internet, everyone. Hide your kids, hide your wife.

This is a long rant of "what if's" that aren't relevant since the details are known.

The "what if the guy didn't do it" is what the justice system is for, attorneys and investigators sort it out.