Hacker Says He Printed Anti-Semitic and Racist Fliers at Colleges Across U.S. | Hacker News Reader

Hacker Says He Printed Anti-Semitic and Racist Fliers at Colleges Across U.S.

nytimes.com

37 pointsJamilD103 comments

> “When it was happening to black students, it was a matter of free speech,” he said. “Now that it’s happening to white, Jewish students, it’s something else. There seems to be no conflation of hate speech and free speech now.”

While I disagree with the calls to remove signs of our past like the ridiculous calls "for the removal of President Woodrow Wilson’s name from the campus because of his racist positions", I think that Asanni York has a point that free speech is free speech. The race/gender/whatever of the accused should not matter.

I'd like to draw attention to the "white only" sign on a bathroom door in SUNY. Because it was a black female who did it, it was called art. Had it been a white male, it would have been called hate crime. We can clearly do better than this.

As far as unauthorized use of campus resources, I think the university would be better served by suing AT&T for failing to adequately protect its network.

> Mr. Auernheimer said he did not hack into the printers, but activated them using remote access.

Or maybe universities and organizations could teach their employees to handle network security better. I don't think this is grounds for a criminal case.

Oh, on what I hope is an unrelated note we should use this opportunity to voice our dissent against the CFAA and judicial reform especially when it comes to selectively overzealous prosecution.

> As far as unauthorized use of campus resources, I think the university would be better served by suing AT&T for failing to adequately protect its network.

It is not the responsibility of a network service provider to protect the assets of a customer. If you're given a network link and an allocation of IP addresses, it is your responsibility to use them wisely and securely.

> Or maybe universities and organizations could teach their employees to handle network security better.

This is more sane thinking.

>> Mr. Auernheimer said he did not hack into the printers, but activated them using remote access.

> Or maybe universities and organizations could teach their employees to handle network security better. I don't think this is grounds for a criminal case.

Actually it is. If you try my car/house door and it's unlocked it doesn't mean you can enter it.

That being said, a fine would be appropriate in this case since minimal harm was done.

> If you try my car/house door and it's unlocked it doesn't mean you can enter it.

I'd say breaking into a computer is more like breaking into someone's mind (something like inception if it exists) rather than breaking into their home. I know it sounds counterproductive to the case in hand but that's because I have no intention of defending weev. I just want us to get out of this idea that we have to somehow tie everything in computers with an analogy like breaking and entering a house.

Here's what I consider a balanced response- prosecute him for some kind of hacking crime, and at the same time fire the system administrators for gross incompetence.

Apparently this happened many times in many places. You can't fire that many people. Who would replace them?

Start firing people for screwing up and their peers will learn not to screw up.

Even the most careful, thoughtful, and professional person will screw up at their job sometimes. It's only if the same screwup is made twice that jobs should be on the line.

The first time is a learning experience, the second time is a demonstration of incompetence.

If you can all your competent people the first time they make a mistake, suddenly you won't have competent people anymore in your misguided quest for perfection.

Their peers will learn that 'screw ups' on whatever arbitrary scale, which are as common as human, will be punished by loss of employment, plus all of the negatives that status carries. This will teach them to become militantly risk averse and, by proxy, utterly afraid of and resistant to change. Meanwhile, the folks you let go, the ones who truly learned the lesson, end up using their newfound experience to improve processes elsewhere.

OK. Sure.

Downvote away. And this will keep happening. Grats on that.

Keep fighting with reality, let's see how that goes.

It's not like people just stop working after they're fired. You can just hire replacements from the people who were fired at other schools. Everybody wins!

  > If you try my car/house door and it's unlocked it doesn't
  > mean you can enter it.

If you have a publicly available web server and I make a "GET /" request on it, am I hacking? If you have a publicly available print server and I make a "PRINT flyer.pdf" request to it, am I hacking?

Interestingly enough the person the article about was convinced and jailed for making GET requests on publicly available websites, because he knew he did not have permission to access them.

I think a print server at a university is pretty obviously not fair game. If you forget to lock up your business overnight and someone walks in and prints off a couple thousand pages using your printer it's definitely illegal.

Yeah, I made an analogy 3 years ago when the Weev case came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6435092 contrasting a publicly accessible web server with a librarian at a public library.

Your "forget to lock up your business overnight" scenario isn't a useful analogy since entering that business would be at least trespass and possibly breaking and entering (no physical breaking needs to occur), so anything after that obviously is a result of exceeding access.

Riffing off of my older analogy, if I entered a library and asked the librarian "Can you please print flyer.pdf?" and the librarian did so, is that "obviously not fair game"?

To be clear, I'm considering only the act of printing rather than the contents of the flyer; it could be a single pixel or the word "LOVE". I suspect that this is ultimately some sort of mischief since it's unlikely he had any plans to travel to each location to pick up the output, but I'm having a hard time seeing how this is hacking.

I think a better analogy would be if a library accidentally placed a paper copy of their members' records in the library alongside the books, you found it, and instead of informing the library of the horrible mistake you took it over to the library photocopy machine and made a copy for yourself and showed it to everyone to humiliate the library for their mistake.

Or if the printer was in a locked room in the back of a library, to be opened only with a keycard, and said "employees only" and you found out that the keycard didn't work quite right so you could walk right in and use it.

It doesn't matter how easy the hack is. If you use someone else's machine in a way that hasn't been made publicly available AND it is public common knowledge that what you are doing is against the wishes of the people who own the hardware then it's illegal and immoral. If a bank exposes monetary transfer functionality by way of a public http GET request it's very stupid but it's still very illegal to use it to steal money from people.

A publicly accessible, internet-connected printer is almost directly analogous to a fax machine that you can phone, transmit a document, and have it print out on the other side. Maybe you intend the phone number to only be called by certain people, but the default behavior will be for the fax machine to accept calls from anybody in the world. So it is for a printer with a public IP address. Sending faxes in this manner (without prior business relationship; not respecting opt-out, etc.) is an FCC violation; it's not hacking. Why would printing be any different?

I agree with you on the ethics/morality of it all.

Can you honestly say that you might come across an unsecured printer on the public internet and truly believe that it was set up that way intentionally and you have the owner's permission to print stuff?

That literally never happens. It's possible in theory, but in practice, if you encounter such a thing and send it a print job, you know you're accessing it without permission.

If you don't have permission and you know you don't have permission and you still do it, that's illegal. Analogies about librarians don't help.

... and that conviction was overturned on appeal. Sometimes the judges get it wrong the first time.

Under US law, it depends on whether you have permission to use the server or not.

The lack of technical enforcement of the permission is irrelevant.

Yes, you probably are. There may not be much technical difference between your hypothetical GET and PRINT requests, but the law generally isn't written or interpreted by technically minded people.

Think of it this way. It is reasonable to assume that a server which responds to http requests on the internet is intended for public browsing. However, a printer that responds to un-authenticated job requests over the internet much more likely to be a configuration error, then intended for public use.

> Actually it is.

Specifically what law did he break?

If someone leaves you a voicemail with a message you don't agree with, is that a crime?

If someone sends you a fax with the same message, is that a crime? [1]

If someone sends you an email with the same message, is that a crime?

If you connect a printer to the internet and someone sends the printer a document with the same message, is that a crime?

I'm sure someone can find a way to apply the CFAA to this, but at the end of the day a printer is not a house. A printer connected to the internet is a server that turns files into paper documents. If you don't want people using your printer, don't place it on the internet with zero authentication or access controls.

[1] advertisements are illegal, not sure about arbitrary messages.

Yeah the fax analogy is spot-on. Nowadays the fax and printer are often the same machine.

The fax analogy is terrible. It's normal to set up a fax machine that anybody can send stuff to without authentication. Nobody ever does that with internet connected printers. If you find one accessible and unsecured, you know it was done by accident.

TFA seems to contradict at least your "nobody ever does that". ISTM that while many of the unsecured printers were mistakenly so, many others were intentionally so.

But we don't need to speculate about motivations. There is very little functional difference between a fax machine and an unsecured printer. The addressing scheme and transmission protocol are different, and the fax is limited to B&W, but those are the only differences of form or function. The differences are in the expectations that some people have. They'd shred obnoxious faxes without comment, but at least for now they won't do that for obnoxious printouts.

Where does it say that many of the unsecured printers were that way intentionally? If you're referring to "Many university printers allow printing from outside their computer networks," that to me is pretty clearly just a way to say, in a nontechnical way, "many university printers are not secured."

> I'd like to draw attention to the "white only" sign on a bathroom door in SUNY. Because it was a black female who did it, it was called art. Had it been a white male, it would have been called hate crime. We can clearly do better than this.

It was called art because that was its intention.

Context matters. Pretending that all words should always mean the same thing regardless of context is a woefully inadequate approach toward understanding human speech. And yes, the person speaking and their intention is part of context.

Surely you don't take people literally when they speak to you in an ironic or satirical tone?!

Context is removed when something like that is placed in a public area. I have no doubt in my mind the art defense would not pass if the person was a white male.

I don't think that's true. If the male artist had the vocabulary to express the intended sentiment, in the same way that the female artist in question was able to, I don't think there would have been the issue you raise. There may indeed have been a different issue, of appropriateness of voice, but I don't think it would have been the hate crime you claim.

I did not claim anything about hate crimes. Only that a black female will get treated much differently than a white male in a situation like this given the art defense. Art should be consumed independently of its creator imo.

> Context is removed when something like that is placed in a public area

And then re-inserted again when the author and his/her intent is identified...

> I have no doubt in my mind the art defense would not pass if the person was a white male.

That would almost certainly depend on the underlying intent and message.

I think you're completely wrong about how improtant identity is in this case, especially if we're trying to determine whether most people would view something as hate speech. The only thing special about a black female is that her underlying intent and message is obivous in context... which, yeah, context matters. Fact Of Human Communication.

If the message were the same as the black female's, it would maybe be identified as "problematic" by some people, but I doubt anyone would call it hate speech. NOTE: This was EXACTLY the response when the black female posted the signs! There was plenty of criticism about tactics even though she was a black female. See https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/18/suny-buffalo-...

If the message were something like "free speech is important", I doubt most people would be sympathetic. Especially mature and thoughtful free-speech activists (even as they defended his right to express those opinions in non-graffiti settings). There are just much better ways of communicating that message. But in any case this almost certainly would not -- de jure -- be considered hate speech.

If it were a professed white nationalist -- as it is in this case -- then it might be considered hate speech and maybe even a hate crime b/c it was graffiti (or, in the case of the article, possibly unauthorized access)

(edit: holy shit a -2 mod on a comment pointing out that context is important to interpreting a message... LOL)

> And then re-inserted again when the author and his/her intent is identified...

People are extremely quick to judge and I am more than certain that if revealed, a white male would be doxxed to infinity and would not be taken at face value with the art defense. We live in an internet outrage society; something like that is red meat.

> stuff on messaging

Messaging only matters if people want to hear the message. Free speech is being shouted down on campuses across the nation. People do not want to hear opposing views, they want to silence them.

> Free speech is being shouted down on campuses across the nation.

The threats to free speech on college campuses come from a lot of directions, but angry undergrads aren't one of them. In fact, politicizing higher education by insisting that campuses are too liberal is far more likely to lead to socially meaningful self-censorship.

Even supposing you're not being paranoid -- which I think you are -- white men not painting racially charged messages on bathroom doors isn't exactly a big loss to society. However, public intellectuals shying away from studying politically charged topics (gun control policy, abortions and contraceptives, stem cells, fundamentalist religions, climate change, etc.) because of political meddling in university hiring and firing decisions is definitely a big loss.

People who complain about free speech on college campuses should carefully consider the actual agendas of the politicians that are manufacturing and harnessing their outrage...

I'm all for free speech. People should be able to offer their thoughts as odious as they might be, so long as they are not threatening, or harming anyone in doing so.

So I'm a bit baffled how people could find it offensive for urban Congo to perform in loincloths. It's a university. I know I saw really strange behavior, and loincloths seem mild. What makes students so sensitive? It's incredible.

Probably the same thing that makes you so sensitive about students at a place you have very little stake in being too sensitive? I mean tink about it. The things that a very miniscule portion of Princeton students choose to complain about can't possibly have any impact on your life unless you choose to care about it.

Clearly, people get offended at all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons all the time. Students aren't a special exception and this is hardly a new phenomenon (even if the Internet makes it more observable). If you don't believe me go read the 1 star reviews on Yelp and co. or the comments on your local newspaper's website. Or read your own comment.

The only difference between the inanity of every-day outrage/argument and students at universities complaining about something like cultural appropriate is that it's young liberals at universities complaining. People love complaining about each of those things individually, so their confluence is click-bait heaven.

To flip the table: what makes people who complain about young liberals at universities being too sensitive so sensitive? It's incredible.

It's not so much that I disagree with the concrete free-speech-promoting policies associated with your position on this issue. But complaining about over-sensitivity is just so silly; it's as if the irony of complaining about complaining is completely lost on everyone who talks about this topic.

Our actions have consequences. I like to ask people what they think about people blocking highways to protest against Donald Trump. People doing dumb things like blocking highways in protest of Trump or pulling his leg in a really makes it easy for his campaign to lump everyone who says he is not fit for office into one group.

Similarly, people who are sensitive about stupid stuff makes it easy for people to lump everyone who has a grievance together into "them" and dismiss their grievances at once. Think the boy who cried wolf but rather than just that one boy getting mauled, it is every single shepherd boy who gets mauled.

This doesn't actually excuse the lumping of people together, and doesn't make the generalized observations about those groups of people any more or less true...

Anyways, this bit of real politic is completely immaterial to my original point, which is that it's stupid and inconsistent to complain about other people's complaining. In particular because your observation about perception works the other way as well.

I think the main difference is that my complaint is against suffocating free speech while their example is about stifling it. I prefer people to be free to express themselves in cacophony over speaking in stifling unison.

Wait, I'm confused...Maybe I'm not reading this right?

Some white kids perform in loin clothes and the university defends it as free speech.

Some dick prints a bunch of racist fliers, and the university takes action to block any more from being printed.

Then we get this: “When it was happening to black students, it was a matter of free speech,” he said. “Now that it’s happening to white, Jewish students, it’s something else. There seems to be no conflation of hate speech and free speech now.”

How is it racist for the school to stop neo-nazi fliers from being printed? What was "happening to black students" when some white guys danced in loin clothes? I hope I'm reading this wrong...I don't want the world to be this stupid.

Weev is a well-known white supremacist. I would take anything he says with a hefty portion of salt.

He claims to be a white nationalist not a supremacist. He's helped the daily stormer site before like when somebody jacked their domain.

I'll take your word for it. I guess I conflate them because they're both utterly abhorrent worldviews.

The difference between a 'white nationalist' and a 'white supremacist' is as meaningful as the difference between a trilby and a fedora.

There's a difference, just like there is in Turk nationalist groups vs Turk supremacy groups (Grey Wolves). One believes they are genetically superior to all others and chosen to rule earth, and can excuse mass murder because they don't see anybody else as human. These groups are extremely dangerous and responsible for the holocaust and genocides in Africa. North Korean juche ideology is also supremist.

The other is a racist nationalist "pride" group that does not believe they are genetically superior like Weev, the Black Nationalist Panthers, ect. For the record I don't subscribe to either ideology but have met plenty of these groups unfortunately.

That quote in the parent is not from Weev, but from a member of the Black Justice League, an activist group active at Princeton.

Why didn't they mention this in the article? This changes the whole meaning of the events.

Also it seems to me it's pretty important that he is not affiliated with the school. If a crazy person comes onto your campus and starts screaming racist profanity at your students it's certainly your right to have them removed. If one of your students does so then you have an entirely different responsibility as an administrator because teaching students to be better is your job, and the actions of your students reflect upon your school.

1. It's the administrator's responsibility to ensure that printers are not exposed to the public internet.

Not doing so is giving 'weev' and others like him a platform to cause mayhem and to further split people across racial lines. I don't know if that's what he's trying to achieve, but I suspect it is.

2. If he's able to further agitate african-americans he is able to widen the gulf between people in racially diverse universities and create an environment prone to more and more hatred. And if he can entice law enforcement into prosecuting him he can then play the part of uber troll and free-speech martyr for his supporters.

The reactions so far play into his hand as high-scale racial aggravation sows discord that he may be able to capitalise on long-term.

I hope it's just trolling as if it is political terraforming it is worrying. What I just described is probably nothing to worry about as it is just one event and it's very likely impossible to orchestrate systemic changes in the way I described.

It should be noted that what weev was doing is nothing new and is really just this:

$ cat payload.ps |netcat -q 0 $printer_ip 9100

This is what was originally posted:

https://storify.com/weev/a-small-experiment-in

Thanks, this is a much better link than the mostly content-free NYT article.

This guy is a real piece of work, sneaking offensive Nazi stuff into random places and then laughing when people get offended. It's basically the Internet version of throwing a punch at someone and then making fun of them for flinching, but with more wasted paper.

Edit: it seems he actually believes the offensive stuff he printed. I just assumed it was chosen because it would offend people the most. I don't know if that makes it better or worse.

I'd argue it's actually an IRL manifestation of some of the worst stuff that has been going on all over the web for a long time. As such, the content is really any different, but it's a lot more noticeable.

That's a pretty good point. A lot of people love to get online and join into 'divisive' stuff by way of anonymity. That's not the Weev style. He is, in my estimation, a textbook example of what was meant by the phrase "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" in the context of the US. The guy certainly knows how to test the bounds of what is or is not criminal, according to the current laws and whatnot.

I totally agree, the only new thing here is that it involves paper, rather than online comment boxes and web page defacing and such. The paper aspect seems to get stronger reactions, since it sounds like people are assuming that something coming out of a printer must be from a local person. Or maybe it's just that paper is more tangible.

If you don't feel like reading the article: the guy wasn't printing bigoted content just to bring attention to the lack of security on printers, he seems to actually believe in this stuff.

I skimmed the article, didnt see anything where he was mentioning that he endorsed the subject other than the implicit endorsement by sending it in the first place. The dudes a troll, of course nazi propaganda is going to create the urge for internet justice, which is probably one of few things that would get people tweeting about it from their high horses.

The article doesn't go into detail, but weev literally has a swastika tattoo on his chest:

http://gawker.com/ipad-hacker-and-troll-weev-is-now-a-straig...

If he's just trolling then he's really, really dedicated to the cause.

> "If he's just trolling then he's really, really dedicated to the cause."

Weev's written extensively about his white supremacist views in the past, I don't think where he actually stands is in any way under contention.

I'd also argue that "dedicated troll" and "true believer" is a distinction without a difference, especially when it comes to the people who are being harassed.

To be honest, I don't know or care enough about him to really research if he truly feels that way. From my semi informed viewpoint, I see where he could see it as a sort of Andy Kaufman style of trolling. He could be just picking a topic that he knows most "normal" people would be outraged about because if he wants to know how well his printer hack worked, a penis enlargement pill or public service announcement would get ignored by the recipients. The dude is toying with people's emotions for his own amusement, just narcissistic behavior.

From the downvotes, it would appear to have worked on many of you here. My replies are on topic and not a personal attack.

But when the only thing he trolls about is white supremacy, what do we have to back that up? All we can really do is look at things at face value.

The swastika tattoo is also a troll, it's not angled like a Nazi swastika and he filled it full of norse mythology symbols thus not an endorsement of National Socialism.

He sure does enjoy the outrage when people see it though making him a walking troll factory.

> The swastika tattoo is also a troll, it's not angled like a Nazi swastika and he filled it full of norse mythology symbols thus not an endorsement of National Socialism.

Riiiight

Lot's of Asians where I live have the same tattoo, if you see an elderly Chinese man on a beach take off his shirt and reveal a 90deg swastika it's not a Nazi endorsement either. If you see a solid black 45deg swastika it's a Nazi tattoo.

Obviously Weev got it to trigger whoever sees it of course.

Why are you excusing his actions based on his intent? If someone goes stomping on people's feet, do we tell those people to loosen up because the stomping was unintentional?

Just check out his twitter account. If he's "just trolling" I suppose he's really dedicated.

There are people who actually believe the earth was created six thousands years ago. What people believe is their own business. This guy isn't running for public office so this shouldn't matter.

In a country where we have a Presidential candidate being introduced by a pastor where he says the Bible says gay people must die, I don't think we have a leg to stand on when it comes to prosecuting people based on their anti-gay "philosophy".

I still believe love shall overcome. It just takes time and effort.

Nobody's talking about prosecuting people for their thoughts. But the foundation of the right to free speech is that thoughts, expressed publicly, mean something, and that public debate matters.

What people believe privately is their own business, sure (until it starts to affect how they act in public). But what they publicly communicate their beliefs in is an entirely legitimate subject of public discourse, if not the primary legitimate subject of public discourse.

I think it matters in this case. A hacker ironically spreading Nazi propaganda for the lulz is different from a hacker spreading Nazi propaganda he actually believes in. Nobody's saying we should persecute this guy for his beliefs, but it means the motivations are different and that matters in some way.

I didn't gather that at all from the storify. He seemed to enjoy people getting all worked up over the content of the papers and the attention it was gaining.

Being a white supremacist, bullying people online (weev stalked and bullied Kathy Sierra off the Internet) and getting people worked up are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They can all be done at the same time.

Weev has always had a perspective of the world that...well...doesn't match reality. I think its become more radicalized after his stint in prison.

At least it was Weev triggering campuses from his hideout in Sarajevo and not phony bank or other fishing printouts to steal money or identities.

Throw out the racist propaganda and close those accessible printer ports with a cheap OpenBSD $40 appliance firewall any first year student can set up. Media is just helping Weev spread his message and marketing for that dailystormer site.

>Media is just helping Weev spread his message

I feel like more attention should be brought to this, and a greater onus put on the media for "enabling" such behavior.

This thought first occurred to me when The Rolling Stone put a glamor shot of Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon terrorist bomber, on its cover.

In the click/eyes-driven world we live in, the line between fame and infamy is increasingly blurred

IMHO, more accountability needs to be placed on the media. Of course, a story needs to be "sold" to keep publications alive - so I wouldn't be opposed to putting a pseudonym attributed to the criminal that doesn't use his/her actual name in the print.

Rarely have I been so conflicted in my deep-seated love of watching rebelliousness towards authority and hegemonic institutions, and my utter dislike of Weev as a human being able to convey his thoughts to others. I'm pretty serious, in that I can tell he's got a legit point with a lot of his, um, 'activities' and yet the presentation is about as appetizing as ipecac. Or, as The Dude once noted about a close associate, "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."

I'm not entirely sure white supremacism (and it seems to be earnest white supremacism) is actually rebelliousness towards authority / hegemony. Like, I'm no fan of authority, but I don't think I would have supported Robert E. Lee's fight against authority.

Oh I wasn't referencing that bit, the white supremacist stuff - I mean the exposing security flaws and basically pointing the finger at the victims for 'allowing' him to get access. That kind of flipping-off authority is interesting to me. The white supremacist stuff is definitely on the other side of the equation, in that his methods and beliefs are categorically opposed to nearly all of mine. I could see the merit in Aaron Schwartz's JSTOR anti-authority issue, Weev doesn't appear to ever get close to that kind/brand/vein of idealism, so to speak.

How is exposing security flaws "rebelliousness"? If an University forgets to lock the doors of its offices and some "troll" walks in and drops racist fliers, which specific hegemonic structure is being fought against?

Fight the power! Encourage people to set appropriate access controls on their printers! Stick it to the man and encourage him to use proper security!

.. at least it's an ethos.

Apparently if you leave a printer open on the Internet for anyone to print to, sometimes neo-Nazi propaganda will come out of it.