Malicious tweet gives journalist Kurt Eichenwald an epileptic seizure | Hacker News Reader

Malicious tweet gives journalist Kurt Eichenwald an epileptic seizure

arstechnica.co.uk

The AssociatesMind article[0] on this is much better than the ArsTechnica link, and goes into detail in the legal dimension of this question. In this case, Kurt's situation likely constitutes assault; and this would also likely be considered assault even if you believe that Eichenwald lied about having a seizure, as I've seen some people question.

Here's the conclusion of that article:

"Just as someone can be held liable for a spring-gun despite being miles away, there is no reason to think that someone cannot be held liable for assault delivered electronically across great distances."

[0]: http://associatesmind.com/2016/12/16/can-you-sue-someone-for...

I hadn't heard of a spring-gun before. Basically this is a booby trap with a gun that shoots unattended when triggers.

I also happen to be a lawyer and not an automotive editor, which I think helps. ;)

Wow, this is equivalent to sending someone a mail "bomb" that doesn't explode but electrocutes them severely.

I hope the offender ends up with a reasonable length prison sentence. There's a clear line, and the intentional infliction of physical harm is well beyond it.

So to be clear, you want someone to be imprisoned because they sent a tweet.

"Intent" is the operative word here.

With the intent of harming someone.

The target could have died. The actions of the attacker were deliberate in trying to induce a seizure that could have killed him. That's attempted murder, and whether it's via a tweet or not is irrelevant.

Yes. This is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theatre [1] or phoning in a bomb threat. In the United States, freedom of speech is limited in certain cases where the harm caused by the speech outweighs the damage of limiting freedom.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

I actually think it's worse than your examples, one could argue that the harm caused in those instances are because of recklessness.

In this case the person intended to inflict harm on another specific person.

Please stop using the "fire in a crowded theatre" phrase, it's not actually part of law in the US. [1] The standard for restricting speech in cases like this is if it poses a "clear and present danger". That's likely the case here, as a premeditated attempt to cause a seizure is a clear and present danger to epileptics. There's plenty of law to cite that doesn't depend on over-broad censorious decisions that got overturned later on.

https://popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackne...

Grand mal seizures can be deadly. Intentionally attempting to trigger one in someone with epilepsy is assault at a minimum.

To be quite clear: YES.

Let's go over what the attacker did (and note, I'm not even going to touch the anti-semitism component).

They demonstrated premeditation, this appeared to be a second attempt at a prior failed attack.

The intent was to cause serious injury.

Max penalties for these types of things is ~10 years in prison.

Hypothetical : Let's say I had an powerful/advanced sniper rifle where I can target a specific person and cause them to have a seizure. Let's say I use this rifle from across state lines. Should I not be getting a visit from the FBI and ending up in federal prison?

I imagine if he'd been the victim of a deliberate hit-and-run, you'd be saying something like "so to be clear, you want someone to be imprisoned because they drove a car."

I believe that the OP wants the attacker to be sent to prison for inflicting harm, pre-meditated, and with intent to do so. that he used a tweet to do this is irrelevant, and frankly, your statement is disingenuous and asinine. But I'm sure you already know that, and are simply trolling

I don't think prison is a best solution for such thing. He will get out and might become only worse. Maybe a psychology professional will make him understand what he did and prevent him from doing it again instead of sticking him into a jail and complain in couple years when he did something more serious. Prison only make it worse in most cases

It's impossible not to reference Snow Crash by Stephenson. I wonder how much "physical" damage can you deliver with an electronic message or image.

Precedent for this is the attack on Epilepsy Foundation website:

https://archive.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/03/epi...

I'd support criminal charges for attackers who do this. It's just a digital way of causing physical damage. The federal government is already all over this stuff in terms of things like SCADA attacks. The FBI would be sympathetic to the case given that plus hating hackers in general.

I wonder how hard would detection be for this kind of dangerous content. A basic detection for rhythmic spikes in frame brightness should not be very hard to implement.

Seems like the best solution to me would be an accessibility option on the device that prevents this type of flashing. May seem hard, but compare that against stopping people from being immature/malicious on the internet.

The added upside would be that it would prevent completely accidental cases of exposure to flashes (e.g. watching an episode of Pokemon).

What if the accessibility settings let you set a maximum framerate for automatically playing moving image content in Safari?

Then the attacker can just pad the malicious content with something benign and then surprise you while watching

There are a number of potential ways to mitigate this type of attack, what concerns me more is the person/people that do this.

I'm looking at http://www.epilepsy.com/learn/triggers-seizures/photosensiti..., and it seems it's not just the framerate that matters. In particular, 5 to 30 frames per second might be enough, and it depends on the actual image contents. It also makes it sound like static images might also be triggers.

This explains why a guy had epilepsy in the metro few days ago. There are bulbs every few meters apart in the tunnel and while the train travels fast it looks like the windows of the metro train flash.

Twitter has a prominent checkbox in the setting allowing you to turn off autoplaying of videos and GIFs. Given that most are not epileptic, and that Eichenwald is, he should have had the mindfulness to check whether the platform could be adapted to his needs.

You are implying that it is Eichenwald's fault and the attacker should be exonerated. Right?

No. Please avoid two-dimensional thinking. The attacker is still responsible.

Prominence of that setting is debatable.

The checkbox is present in Twitter's main settings page (the one you land on immediately after clicking "Settings", not a subsection) and is also above-the-fold.

Also, I just found out he said a few months ago: "I was carrying my iPad, looking at the still image on the video and, without thinking, touched the PLAY button."

So it seems he's aware of it.

From his writing about this in Newsweek [0]:

> I was carrying my iPad, looking at the still image on the video and, without thinking, touched the PLAY button.

Sounds like autoplay was already turned off.

[0] http://www.newsweek.com/epileptogenic-pepe-video-507417

I'm looking for someeone who call help me build a mitigating plugin.

https://github.com/fredzannarbor/strobefree

No record of pressed charges as of this morning. Seems more likely to be a media redirection of his meltdown with Tucker Carlson.

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