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Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

What's scary to me is that the crime doesn't fit the punishment. We're going to take a genius away from civilization where he could use his potential in constructive ways, and lock him up for something that, realistically, isn't as bad as when bankers launder many millions of dollars, or when identity thieves steal. So we will probably give this guy a life sentence for being smarter than 90% of the American workforce and almost uncovering secrets that shouldn't be being kept anyway. Why can't we throw the book at corrupt politicians and businessmen this hard?

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The CFAA is too blunt of an instrument. At the very least it should have options for lesser charges.

But for some reason every politician's reaction to cyber events is to make the CFAA more draconian. President Obama is actually in favor of adding more provisions by amendment this year.

I'm not sure of the correct way to handle cybercrime laws, but I know the CFAA isn't it.

> But for some reason every politician's reaction to cyber events is to make the CFAA more draconian.

I forget who said this, but it's because to a lot of this generation of politicians, a lot of "hacking" and "cybercrime" is a modern-day witchcraft. Aside from a few allies in Congress, technological aptitude (and those that actually understand cybersecurity) will likely lag until a lot of these older career politicians are replaced by "digital natives".

It's not just politicians, either. Some execs at non-tech companies respond to penetration tests in the same way. "How did you do that?" "Why is this possible?" It's just completely outside of their realm of knowledge, and they trust their systems to be as failsafe as most mechanical ones.

And this is our fault as programmers. We build crappy systems.

No, its their fault as executives. Secure systems are expensive and they take time to build properly, which is fully at odds with, "I need this done yesterday". Unfortunately (for them), since they cut the checks, the also get what they pay for.

I don't think he was uncovering any secrets that shouldn't be kept, he sure seemed to target credit card and identity data.

Reading the indictment he comes across to me as a credit card thief wrapping his crimes in activism.

https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/05/10/lauri_love.pdf

"LOVE and his conspirators unlawfully obtained information the victims identified in thisIndictment morethan 100,000 employee records, including names, social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and salary information, and more than 100,000 financial records, including credit card numbers and names, and caused loss aggregating in excess of $5 million"

"On or about July4, 2013, LOVE wrote the following in an IRC chatroom using the online nickname "peace": "it worked ... we have... easily 5-10k contractor and gov credit cards "

"That same day, LOVE uploaded to a computer server a spreadsheet containing information obtained from iq.govwin.com, including names, job titles,addresses, phone numbers, and approximately 23,000 credit cards numbers with expiration dates and items purchased. Other members of the conspiracy obtained copies of the spreadsheet from the server on or about January 24,2014, and on or about March 10,2014"

In other chats published in the indictment, Love is alleged to have said: "You have no idea how much we can fuck with the US government if we wanted to," and, after describing the data as "really sensitive", adding: "It's basically every piece of information you'd need to do full identity theft on any employee or contractor for the [government agency]."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/28/us-briton-hack...

He's a genius? I thought the US was embarrassed by how dumb the vulnerabilities he exploited were. Which is it?

Well, in fairness he is somewhat smart. Most people don't successfully hack the FBI and the Federal Reserve.

The U.S. wasn't as smart as it should have been. Let's put it that way.

Are they mutually exclusive?

whats annoying to me is this nonsense while the us employs people to hack into other government systems - including the uk, with impunity. (nsa hacking tools leak).

UK should be giving lauri love a new identity and a fat paycheck. Not pandering to the administration of a country soon to be run by either a crazed sickly war hawk or a full retard that gets all his world news from fox.

How can you compare the crime to the punishment when we don't know his punishment yet? He hasn't been convicted, let alone sentenced, and he won't get anywhere near 99 years.

we need to send a clear message to all the other geniuses.

Don't even look at the Man sideways. Keep your head down and hope he walks on by.

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