He was found to have done $73k damages. Why? AT&T sent a physical letter to all 114k people, and that was the cost of the postage. Convicted to 41 months in prison.
https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/22/weev-files-appeal-gets-new...
I may be downvoted to hell and then some, but it's impossible to look beyond those facts before mythologizing him into some sort of hacker hero
He doesn't have to be hero worshipped - his actions in this particular case should stand on their own. His terrible beliefs may only come into it if they are relevant to what actions he performed.
Serving prison time for notifying people of a serious privacy breach doesn't seem to be a balanced approach.
Except his crime wasn't "notifying people of a privacy breach". It was breaching that privacy. There was absolutely no reason whatsoever for him to actually scrape the personal information of 114k people.
Reporting on his "hacker hero antics" without putting it in context of what a personality he really is is, in my book, whitewashing of history and engaging in revisionism.
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Whilst I agree with you in part, I also believe that over-emphasising personality traits or behaviours of a person also engages in revisionism.
One should be able to view an event entirely separate from the person, if the person's generalised behaviour isn't relevant.
We don't need to think about the man at all, in my own opinion, in this particular case. Redact his name if you have concerns that the man is unworthy of attention.
Adding complaints of a person to any mention of them is calling for jury and judgement. It's a distraction from what's important. It takes an event that should be discussed and explored, and twists it so you are forced to take sides about the person.
You can use these tactics to derail any conversation. It's a debating tactic commonly used in politics to avoid answering questions.
It might be better in future just to say something along the lines of "Aside: Can we not use his name? The guy is actually a racist, and has a pretty deplorable past."
We don't want to get lost in the debate of a man's merits, when his actions may themselves be meritorious.
They are not relevant for judging whether scrapping data from unprotected 14mil urls should be seen as hack. They are relevant to whether suggestion that he was well intentioned white hat doing public service claims sounds naive or likely. It matters when I have to decide whether I will buy his framing of events and motivations or not. Such claims very much existed and were predominant interpretation of evens in circles I was in.
Edited to add: then you had weev using his bigger fame and sort of new credibility to try to cause further harm to person he harassed somewhere around going to/from prison. So to me, it makes sense for people seen it at the time to jump into these discussions to prevent further rise of credibility.
I think the deal with Weev is that everything he does is both serious and a joke. He does appear to be a nazi but if you try to stitch together his actual person it gets twisted really quickly. He has a personality disorder. I think a lot of people caught in his reality distortion field didn't quite get that playing around with "edgy" troll stuff normalizes things that eat up self and society. I definitely have seen a change in the casual dabbling with it since Charlottesville. While I have some sympathy for people that believed the lie that it's all jokes... I don't think Weev ever thought it was just jokes. He's extremely smart and fucking dangerous. I hope one day he gets a moment to reflect and use his brain for something that isn't being the fentanyl of meme pushers.
EDIT: DO NOT GOOGLE GNAA or GOATSE AT WORK
Seriously?
Probhably most readers are too young to remember this "important" piece of internet lore. Let's just say it was the first, massively not safe for work web site.[1]
Naming his company after that is quite fitting.
Here[0] is a DEFCON talk from a GNAA/lulsec affiliate talking about trolling as an art. I think the talk actually has some interesting things going on when looked at through the lens of what weaponized trolling has produced in the now. At one point someone in the audience asks the presenter to read his "funny" slides and it's a racist "joke" comic. He acts embarrassed and says "I don't believe this stuff." He does break down a few of their trolling tools from their repo that they were pretty proud of at the time. So the curious can scope that out if you don't have to browse to any of their official sites or do a risky google. This was before Facebook so it's mostly IRC tools and general troll culture commentary.
They used the ATT dump, knowing it wasn’t really illegal to get hype to sell their services. I think it worked?
Here's a pretty good piece on him with a reporter who followed him around during the first trial. I think it covers a lot of it[1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHqGV5WjS4w
[1] https://medium.com/matter/the-martyrdom-of-weev-9e72da8a133d
EDIT: DO NOT GOOGLE GNAA or GOATSE AT WORK. Links should be mostly SFW. Obviously YMMV. It's content made by/about professional offensive assholes.
Sniff. I want my natille portman and grits :'(
I have a mixed racial background and am of Jewish heritage, and could never take offense to what he spews because of the insincerity sensed in his tone and his own supposed Jewish heritage. If anything I just laugh at him because, like Alex Jones and Ann Coulter, he's a performance artist. A Tony Clifton, if you will
That he is neonazi and harassed people quite hard (to the point of seriously affecting their careers and lives) are things that I learned only much later and people still don't like those two being brought up in pretty much any context.