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Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

businessinsider.com

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Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#51

Post by crusso »

rcfox wrote: post #47
crusso wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing car door handles in a full parking lot is amazingly simple too. Does that mean it's okay to look through any unlocked cars' glove compartments to collect personal information of the owners? Auernheimer crossed a line. The punishment seems excessive, but then again I don't know all the details of what he tried to do with the data. The fact that he obtusely refuses to recognize that he crossed a line doesn't ex…

If you have a lot full of unlocked cars, perhaps you should bear some of the blame too? When Sony was hacked and user data was leaked, they received quite a bit of blame. At least they had some semblance of security. AT&T was wide open.

If you have a lot full of unlocked cars, perhaps you should bear some of the blame too?

Yeah, and women wearing sexy dresses walking alone without mace deserve to get raped?

Auernheimer crossed a line. Just because AT&T was stupid doesn't make what he did right.

Customers' and the legal systems' dealing with AT&T's incompetence/negligence is a separate matter.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#52

Post by crusso »

Nrsolis wrote: post #50
rcfox wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a lot full of unlocked cars, perhaps you should bear some of the blame too? When Sony was hacked and user data was leaked, they received quite a bit of blame. At least they had some semblance of security. AT&T was wide open.

"But your honor! SHE WAS ASKING FOR IT! You can see how she dresses."

Ack! You beat me to the "asking for it" analogy.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#53

Post by rcfox »

Nrsolis wrote: post #50
rcfox wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a lot full of unlocked cars, perhaps you should bear some of the blame too? When Sony was hacked and user data was leaked, they received quite a bit of blame. At least they had some semblance of security. AT&T was wide open.

"But your honor! SHE WAS ASKING FOR IT! You can see how she dresses."

You've missed my point. If you were in a parking lot and found your car to be unlocked, this might alarm you. You might try someone else's door to see if it's similarly unlocked, and just to be sure it's not a fluke, you might try another.

I'm not even going to try to adapt that to your rape scenario. I feel like there should be an equivalent of Godwin's law that I could appeal to in this context.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#54

Post by arbuge »

crusso wrote: post #49
arbuge wrote: post #34

It seems to that the real villain is AT&T, for making this private data entrusted to its care freely available to the public. What criminal and civil liabilities will it face?

That's disingenuous. "Freely available" implies that AT&T desired to give this data away or advertised it knowingly. Clearly they didn't. What Auernheimer did, with intent, was to bypass AT&T's intended use of the system. What AT&T did was incompetent or perhaps even negligent by a reasonable notion of corporate coding standards. You'd need to dig a bit more to learn how systemic the incompetence/negligence was befor…

Disagreed. The facts are indeed that AT&T made this freely available... my definition of making something available is that it is readily available for the taking, whether I desired to give it away or not. If I leave my front door open due to negligence, I probably don't desire to be burglarized, but it is true to say that I have made my house contents freely available. If my house contents include a laptop full of people's private data, then I think it's reasonable I should face some penalties.

As to your other point, AT&T is responsible for the actions of its contractors as well as for its full-time employees.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#55

Post by rwmj »

betterunix wrote: post #48
rwmj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK, but my answer would equally well apply to the US or the majority of democratic nations. There's not a Big Conspiracy. There's just lots of people, often stupid and ill-informed, but nevertheless people voting for what we want.

"There's just lots of people, often stupid and ill-informed, but nevertheless people voting for what we want." How exactly do you think uninformed people are voting for what they want? The USA is a country where people are surprised by what is illegal.

Firstly, it is possible to go out and inform people. Best to get off HN and out of the house, because only a tiny number of pretty intelligent people use HN and all of us have similar backgrounds and beliefs.

Secondly, although I think HN-readers would make great voters on subjects we care about, eg. how the Internet should be regulated, yet I'm sure we'd be mostly stupid and ill-informed about things that we don't know or care about, eg. farming regulations, or sickness benefits for elderly mentally-ill patients, or a thousand other specialized subjects.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#56

Post by illuminate »

davidw wrote: post #36
lukifer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like you're manufacturing normalcy. Reality is too complex to fit into a narrative. Our system manages to be both corrupt and democratic at the same time, with money, fame and influence all helping to distort outcomes, both on behalf of private interests and We The People.

There is corruption in pretty much any system without a complete and total police state. Most western democracies are highly imperfect. But they're a lot better than pretty much anything else that has been tried, and if people work hard , they can continue to improve them. Hard work means "getting out of the building" though.

"without a complete and total police state"

And ~especially~ in a complete and total police state :)

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#57

Post by betterunix »

rwmj wrote: post #55
betterunix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's just lots of people, often stupid and ill-informed, but nevertheless people voting for what we want." How exactly do you think uninformed people are voting for what they want? The USA is a country where people are surprised by what is illegal.

Firstly, it is possible to go out and inform people. Best to get off HN and out of the house, because only a tiny number of pretty intelligent people use HN and all of us have similar backgrounds and beliefs. Secondly, although I think HN-readers would make great voters on subjects we care about, eg. how the Internet should be regulated, yet I'm sure we'd be mostly stupid and ill-informed about things that we don't k…

"yet I'm sure we'd be mostly stupid and ill-informed about things that we don't know or care about"

That is not the issue. The issue is whether or not we are expected to follow laws that we know nothing about, particularly since ignorance of the law is not considered a valid defense in this country. If you are not running a farm, you are not expected to adhere to farming regulations and you could not violate those regulations. On the other hand, if you use a computer -- and the majority of US citizens do -- you are expected to abide by computer laws.

Right now, there are a lot of laws that everyone is expected to follow but that few people are aware of. Most Virginia residents had no idea that opposite-sex cohabitation was illegal when that law was repealed -- millions of people in that state could have faced prosecution for a law they were never aware of (and in the 90s a woman was threatened with prosecution as part of an attempt to shut down her business). Typically, the police are unaware of these laws and so most people will never be arrested even if they are in violation. On the other hand, when the government wants to prosecute someone (e.g. Alexander Shulgin), all they need to do is look hard enough to find a law the person violated. Sometimes the government seeks nothing more than to set a precedent (Aaron Swartz) that would allow them to prosecute others. That is where the real danger lies: the government is limited not by the lack of criminal laws but by its own inefficiency in searching the legal code.

Most people are entirely unaware of this situation and believe that as long as they are not harming anyone they are safe. It is hard to raise awareness, because most people do not see anyone being prosecuted in this way, and even when they see it they usually have a hard time feeling sympathy for the defendant (e.g. Lori Drew). After all, who can feel sorry for someone who collects this sort of artwork:

http://www.japanator.com/man-arrested-for-manga-collection-t...

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#58

Post by Encosia »

objclxt wrote: post #17
Encosia wrote: post #12

It blows my mind that someone could get 10 years for idempotent operations on what was essentially a public API. Put in any other context than "scary computer hacking", it would be obvious to most people that the insecure system was at least as much to blame as this kid.

Firstly, the laws around this sort of thing are very stupid. But with that said...I'm not wholly sympathetic here. The disclosure was totally botched . The IRC logs that came out during the case showed that Andrew and Dan (Spitler) talked about shorting AT&T stock (they ended up not doing this, but it's not the sort of thing you talk about), and going directly to news organisations, bypassing AT&T. They also consider…

To me, it's not a question of black/gray/white hat. This was as much a "hack" as grabbing a handful of business cards out of the free-lunch-for-your-office drawing bowl at Chipotle. Regardless of what nefarious purposes someone had for snatching those business cards, almost everyone would see it as ludicrous to suggest a 10 year sentence for the act of grabbing that unguarded data alone.

Even though this guy is no role model, it makes me deeply uneasy to see AT&T get away so easily with reframing their own incompetence as innocent victimization.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#59

Post by betterunix »

crusso wrote: post #44
sergiotapia wrote: post #39

"In 2010, Auernheimer and a compatriot, Daniel Spitler, discovered that visiting an unsecured AT&T Web server and entering a number associated with the customer's wireless account allowed him to obtain that customer's email address. By altering the number and repeatedly querying the server, Auernheimer and Spitler were able to obtain hundreds of thousands of email addresses, which they then released to Gawker." === A…

Testing car door handles in a full parking lot is amazingly simple too. Does that mean it's okay to look through any unlocked cars' glove compartments to collect personal information of the owners? Auernheimer crossed a line. The punishment seems excessive, but then again I don't know all the details of what he tried to do with the data. The fact that he obtusely refuses to recognize that he crossed a line doesn't ex…

"Auernheimer crossed a line"

The problem is where the line is drawn, not whether he crossed it.

Re: Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer Faces Jail

#60

Post by betterunix »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #19
jrockway wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is AT&T guilty of? Is it now legal to publish personal information without any authentication?

I just listed the charges, I didn't say I agreed with them. And I didn't say anything about AT&T. It seems clear that AT&T failed to protect their customer's personal details. Whether that makes them criminally liable depends on US law, about which I know almost nothing. This [1] article seems to imply that it is fairly weak compared to European data protection laws, so it may be that AT&T did nothing wrong in a stri…

"While its tempting to think that he was just made an example of for embarrassing a corporation, he did write a script to harvest 120,000 email addresses from the AT&T server. I'd say that constitutes criminal intent, even if he had no intention of using the addresses for a criminal purpose."

Criminal intent...to do what exactly? Email people? Was he planning to send them spam?

Why are we punishing someone who writes a script? Do we really want to live in a society where programming your own computer is a crime?

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