A Man Who Made the Mistake of Trying to Help Wikileaks | Hacker News Reader

A Man Who Made the Mistake of Trying to Help Wikileaks

motherboard.vice.com

91 pointsdsr1282 comments

A systems administrator downloads a random zip file and a password cracker onto his work computer, when he works for the Department of Energy, gets caught and fired. The first part of the article is surprising only in that he found it so easy to get a good job in finance afterwards.

To be honest I'm not entirely sure what the point of the article is at all. He freely admits that the FBI had cause to be suspicious about his travel to Iceland, it coincided with a massive breach of information and he definitely fit the bill to warrant investigation. He and his associates all were afforded the right to counsel etc, in terms of US law enforcement stories this is more of an example of how things should be done within the context of the law as it stands.

> To be honest I'm not entirely sure what the point of the article is at all.

To throw mud at Wikileaks, as if there aren't substantive criticisms they could be making.

I think the article has several points:

1: Downloading controversial data on a work computer is a bad idea.

2: When a agency like the FBI is targeting a person its very likely to cause significant harm. They do not harm minimize and can/will go after everyone you know, have meet, scare a company to fire you, ectra. The movie version where a single investigator is asking people nicely and discreetly can be a far cry from the real thing.

3: Because of the way those government agencies operate they are likely to push people into polar opposite political activity of the very goals the agency is trying to reach. Katz could likely been a tech founder here on HN, but because of the way FBI operated he now instead founded a large foreign political party with some very strong feelings about the US and the FBI.

3. I actually went on to work for a few startups here in Iceland and got stock in one of them so this didn't completely kill that trajectory, but yes the harassment certainly made certain future choices for me.

The FBI raided his girlfriend's parents house and harassed and disrupted the lives of all his friends and family prior to him going to Iceland.

All he did was download a file. The FBI knew he was politically motivated but treated him like a criminal.

Sure his first employer is within their rights to fire him. But the hedge fund only fired him (despite him already giving notice to leave) after the FBI showed up to harass and disrupt his life.

This is not how law enforcement should work.

And yet, because of the prevailing attitude of the poster to whom you are replying, this is probably how law enforcement will remain.

"THEY GET WHAT THEY DESERVE" is an easy and natural philosophy to have, until it happens to you and your family.

And then still, many people are subtley and/or overtly pressured (terrorized) into not joining any kind of activist or opposition movement

In a police state we are all suspicious. If you'd lived in a communist/fascist country you'd know that.

> To be honest I'm not entirely sure what the point of the article is at all. He freely admits that the FBI had cause to be suspicious about his travel to Iceland, it coincided with a massive breach of information and he definitely fit the bill to warrant investigation.

Surprise, not all journalism is outrage porn and propaganda :)

I remember when this happened. I didn't get to talk to Katz for a year or more after the server got taken down. He confirmed later his move was basically due to fear of the feds trying to come down on him however they could while collecting scalps in response to the Wikileaks/Manning leaks. All of this wouldn't have been possible without Lamo feeding virtually useless information to the feds to try to score brownie points with them, and Strutt doing absolutely nothing to protect the server he hosted for his "friends" in the hacker community. It was a sad wake-up call.

Heya Jason here, have we talked in the past? I was actually already in the process of my way out of the states when all this went down. In a general sense Fedz rely on disrupting the support networks (familial and friend) of those persons whom they deem targets. It's a common pattern when they've got a high profile case and they're being pressed by administration for somebody, anybody to prosecute.

Hey this is cf. I had no idea this was all going on, and I appreciate you trying to shield me and other people from getting pulled into this. You dropped off Jabber and I worried if you were alright. I'm glad to see you thriving in Iceland.

oh hey! yea I definitely cut contact with a lot of folks without explaining to them that it was to keep them out of a position where they might inadvertently lie to LEO and themselves then be coerced into helping.

I don't think many people understand that lying to Federal officials, even innocuous ones can be prosecutable, depending on zealous they want to be.

I appreciate it. Anyway all my old email addresses still work if you want to get back in touch.

The words of yours which resonated with me were how your support network was rounded up and I had similar experience from a completely left field, but the same origin in as much LEO was desperate to have me charged with anything. Bit of explanation is in my recent comment history just the other day I realised that my personal privacy had been traded long ago unknown to me and the results I can only hope will be as recreative in my life.

I'm tempted to joke that the TL;Dr for all such encounters is Authority Cannot Afford Being Wrong But Isolated From Social Function Unable To Evaluate Reputation Risk.

Warning, this "website" eats 100% CPU every time you dare to scroll to read text.

https://outline.com/rwFtgt

This is an amazing service I didnt know about. Thank you.

Gee. Seems like a short time until publishers sue for infringement. Laughably, Outline's terms require that you (the browser) have [1] "all the rights to the Content".

[1] "You represent and warrant that you have all the rights to the Content and that none of the Content: (a) infringes, misappropriates or violates any Intellectual Property Rights; ..."

as long as they respond to DMCA takedown requests they are not legally liable

not on my browser. probably ad-block related, i.e. I'm using ad-block and the page doesn't eat all my CPU.

I have Ad Block and it spikes to 60% CPU

Have you tried uBlock Origin?

Ublock Origin here and no problems. That page needs some CPU when opening it, but then CPU usage drops significantly to less than 5%.

Christ that's janky, takes a good half a second to begin scrolling after I pull down on my trackpoint.

Javascript was a mistake.

I have all JS disabled by default. Site looks fine. :)

Same. Loads quickly too!

Same, and the scrolling is horribly laggy.

Using Reader-Mode in FireFox works, though.

Using uBlock Origin and Ghostery, seems to cut the vast majority of that... I do allow the comment services and media options though.

Unfortunate the clickbait headline says it was a "mistake". A mistake is something you wish you hadn't done.

"I don't regret my actions, because they led me on a really interesting journey."

It's not click bait, what you are defining is regret and regret is not needed for something to be a mistake.

I have made many mistakes in my life - some I regret, others I do not.

I disagree.

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