Sarah Palin’s email hacker is imprisoned, against judge’s recommendation
nakedsecurity.sophos.com
nakedsecurity.sophos.com
The judge didn't "recommend" that he serve it in a half-way house; he just said that 'even a half-way house would be sufficient punishment' . That doesn't mean he said "it must be in a half-way house".
Also: he's been sent to a low-security prison, and not a Super-Max.
It is very, very hard for me to imagine mustering much sympathy for him. People are routinely imprisoned for computer-related crimes less blatant than this one. More importantly, people are routinely imprisoned for truly victimless crimes like "intent-to-distribute" escalations of simple drug possession. None of them have the resources this guy seems to have had.
I'm not sure the "burden" of a low-security prison far from his home is an injustice of a cosmic scale.
It's not an "injustice of a cosmic scale" so it may not rise to your threshold of caring, but he's still a young man going to prison for what is essentially a prank. Have a little compassion.
It is blindingly obvious that most expressions of sympathy here are because people approve of the target of the felonious actions. Had he hacked Biden's email the press would have called for his head and wrung their hands so hard about the evils of people who oppose Obama/Biden that they might have fallen off due to lack of blood flow.
But creating an environment where it's OK or acceptable to do this sort of this thing to "acceptable targets" is creating an environment where one day, you'll be an "acceptable target". Take a stand. Attempting to influence elections like this is wrong and can't be tolerated, in addition to the fact that hacking emails is wrong and can't be tolerated. Being sympathetic because you like the target is embracing the rule of men, not the rule of law.
No. I'm sympathetic because it was a very stupid prank, not because of the target.
What was the actual damage caused? It certainly didn't "paralyze" Palin's campaign.
How come Palin hasn't been charged with anything? She just resigns and people don't bother to follow up. That's fine and all, but it's a nice backdrop to this kid getting the book thrown at him.
The only people I see suggesting that this email spool contained evidence of wrongdoing are partisan armchair legal theorists. And, for the record, I think Palin is a genuine force for evil in our country.
Meanwhile, if your email was hacked? No way the feds take the case. That's what I'm upset about, mostly. The dufus broke the law but it seems we have an entirely different standard for enforcement.
RE: evidence of wrongdoing, state business over personal email is illegal, period, and for very good reasons. This is professional ethics 101 if you've taken an oath to serve the public in elected office. If you're doing public business, it has to be on the record. It's legal not theory, it's legal fact.. if it applies to an Alderman, it applies to the Governor.
And people wonder why I see "politics!" pouring forth from every orifice here. Put them both in jail. If that's what the rule of law demands, do it. Doesn't bother me. I want to live in a country where my elected officials do their dealings on the record as required by law and people are not allowed to break into my email merely because I am a politically unpopular target. (Thanks to the fact that I think this way, I'll never not be on the politically unpopular list if one is ever actually allowed to come into existence. Freedom's important.)
Which makes it worse.
Tens of thousands of people, many of them parents, are currently serving time in prison because they were at random selected to be among the 1% of American drug users arbitrarily selected for prosecution, and inhabited the (large) subset of those drug users who lacked the means to defend themselves once charged.
THIS nitwit went out of his way to harm somebody else for his own amusement.
Would that imply then that other, clearly more serious crimes, that result in similar sentences, should have their sentences increased to be proportional?
I'm not asking to be judgmental, I'm honestly curious. In my mind, breaking into a mailbox isn't that big of a deal in most cases. But I can recognize an alternate argument such as "what if the mailbox in question contained corporate secrets worth billions of dollars".
In the former a year or more sentence seems excessive, in the later case a year would seem insufficient.
Incidentally, breaking into a physical mailbox is a much bigger deal, which makes zero sense to me.
So far, most people think that physical incursions into a person's private things are more serious than virtual incursions. Perhaps it's the physical safety aspect of it that they think is important.
For what it's worth, I think virtual privacy should be treated exactly the same as physical privacy, and sadly the law hasn't quite figured that out (I think we're in agreement on this)
But I disagree with you that punishment should always be severe. I think data shows that severe punishments do little to prevent crime, and end up just costing everybody lots of tax dollars in incarceration costs.
I do not agree --- in fact, I militantly disagree --- with the notion that physical harm should be more severely punished than virtual harm. Crimes should be punished based on the harm they cause and based on society's interests in deterring crimes. The ease with which a crime is committed should not be a factor in its sentencing.
All crimes are going to get easier to commit this century.
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/jan/13/convicted-p...
If he shows good conduct, they might release him as soon as November 23rd as confirmed by his entry in the The Federal Bureau of Prisons website:
(It was a very long search URL so I shortened it) Inmate Locator - Locate Federal inmates from 1982 to present http://tinyurl.com/6cv8r93
For those interested, here is the location he will be serving time at:
The flip side to "I want my e-mail treated like normal mail" is that the same penalties will need to be levied. Private citizens can get in a lot of trouble for tampering with regular mail.
source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/09/palin-e-mail-ha/
He didn't even have to guess or crack a password. This is really a major security flaw on yahoo's part, which still exists. The fix in the meantime is to avoid accounts with such questions, or to answer them with random strings of characters.
Should this even be a crime? I propose that to keep something secret you should have reasonable security measures. Easily guessable security questions like mother's maiden name as used by banks should not be considered legitimate protection any more than using a bag twisty to hold a gate closed should be considered the same as a chain and padlock.
The world is not a video game.
The difficulty required to break into someone's email account has absolutely nothing to do with the legal implications of doing so. It is very possible that you could be convicted of a felony for reading mails on a passwordless email account.
Stay the hell out of other people's email accounts. Jiminy.
Related: http://i.imgur.com/rGtgr.jpg
If it's clear to you that you aren't to enter my property, you don't enter my property and it doesn't matter how difficult I make it for you to do what you already know is wrong.
The issue here is the severity of the sentence, not his guilt, and especially not blaming the victim.
No actually the "crime" was "anticipatory obstruction of justice" for destroying evidence in a federal investigation. Actually accessing the account was a misdemeanor.
Look I think this is a stupid kid who doesn't deserve a year a in jail. But you don't get to trivialize a crime because it was "easy". Just because my neighbors door was unlocked and I "just walked in" doesn't give me the right to do so.
If the door is closed and locked it is breaking and entering which is a felony that brings prison time.
If the door is open and unlocked it's trespassing which is a misdemeanor and will seldom get jail time.
Do you really think a criminal who walks up to a house with a lock pick in hand and then finds the door unlocked gets charged with a lesser crime?
From Legal Dictionary's entry on "Breaking and Entering"
"The criminal act of entering a residence or other enclosed property through the slightest amount of force (even pushing open a door), without authorization. If there is intent to commit a crime, this is burglary. If there is no such intent, the breaking and entering alone is probably at least illegal trespass, which is a misdemeanor crime. 2) the criminal charge for the above."
Firesheep is a tool whose sole purpose is to facilitate hijacking a user's session. If you use Firesheep to gain access to a user account which you don't own, you're guilty of breaking the law.
The fact that the tool makes this easy has no bearing on its legality.
So yes, everyone who has used Firesheep to gain access to another user's account without their permission is guilty of breaking the law.
That's ridiculous. He didn't deform anything, he just presented the information he had. You also break the law when you go too fast on the highway and you don't go to jail.
There are things which are yours, and there are things which are not yours. In many instances, accessing things which are not yours without the express permission of the actual owner is a crime.
And I'm not going to argue with you if you're saying that the sentencing for computer-related crimes is ridiculous. I agree, I think it's totally out of whack (like a lot of sentencing in this country).
And depending on how fast you are going on the highway you do indeed go to jail (most jurisdictions will charge you with reckless driving).
The thing about Firesheep is that it is inherently difficult to figure out which of the 30 people in the coffeeshop hijacked your session. It's not exactly as if they have a separate IP or something. Just because it's hard to get caught doesn't mean that it's okay to do, though.
Palin has done 100x worse than this kid, but she doesn't get caught because she paralyzes other candidates campaigns the legal way. By not getting caught when dredging dirt on other people's campaign. However Palin was still unsuccessful because now we have a muslim Kenyan extremist turban-wearing islamic terrorist fist-bumper as president.