Sentenced to 10 years, Marty Gottesfeld wrote about Bureau of Prisons corruption

> The story drew the attention of Marty Gottesfeld, a computer-security expert. He was appalled at the treatment to which Justina and her family were being subjected and he decided to act. He initiated a denial of service attack against the Children’s Hospital computer system and against the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network, where Justina was later moved.

However, this is a hospital, imagine if the DOS somehow would of contributed to a death.

It seems clear to me that Brown was certainly criminally culpable, but also that his sentence was outlandish and unjust.

It's less clear to me that what happened to Gottesfeld was wrong. For one thing: Gottesfeld doesn't appear to be any sort of "whistleblower". His information about the Justina Pelletier case came from the right-wing media, where the case had gone viral. Moreover, his response to that information was to organize DDOS attacks that shut down the electronic pharmacy at Boston Children's Hospital; they literally had to go back to paper prescriptions and faxes during the attack. He had originally targeted a fundraising website BCH was running, but quickly realized that he was attacking the infrastructure of the hospital itself, which he then bragged about taking down.

After being caught, he attempted to flee to Cuba, but stranded himself just off the Cuban coast and had to be rescued by a Disney Cruise ship, which took him back to the US.

The final thing I want to point out is that Barrett Brown is a person who appears to have believed that Stratfor was a powerful mercenary intelligence outfit, and not a grifting zine for aspirational Tom Clancy types with desk jobs. Stratfor was a figure of fun in the real intelligence community, and had none of the malign influence Barrett attributed to them; if anything, by helping arrange their hack, he helped the real IC. Certainly nothing Stratfor did justified dumping the credit cards of people who had subscribed. But, more importantly: take whatever Brown says with an appropriate tonnage of salt.

Patient dieing on the bed and need to access their MRI scan from another hospital? Nope.

Marty was (and I'm sure still is) incredibly arrogant. As the FBI got closer and closer to catching him, he would continually make up different stories about how "Anonymous" was doing all of this, etc. etc. After confronting him with irrefutable evidence, he made claims about large botnets he controlled, and other various crimes. His goal immediately shifted from completely innocent to criminal mastermind (again, huge arrogance)

After being caught (which he was 100% certain would never happen), he attempted to flee the country by boat with his wife, almost died, and was picked up by a cruise ship.

He is not a physically abusive guy, but something is not mentally 100% with him. He had an ok IT consultant career before all of this, but he very much assumed he was smarter than everyone else.

Edit: Also not surprised about his outrageous claims of secret prisons, toxic water, etc. This is just what the guy does, bullshits and makes stuff up. He probably actually believes what he is saying (again, mentally off).

People in this state very much take for granted that the administrative portion of government is competent and knows what it's doing. Government here is generally competent but there are many pockets of incompetent political appointees and totally under-resourced teams and there's no way of telling which is which from the outside. People also take as fact the word of big important prestigious organizations that are experts in what they do (and with good reason, they are usually right). BCH and similar may be experts as a whole and government may be competent in general but these institutions are made up of people and people aren't perfect and they get things wrong sometimes. Someone at BCH clearly made the wrong call. That wrong call got plopped on the desk of some overworked bureaucrat who takes it at face value because they're overworked and they're experts so why not trust them, they made the wrong call. So then the next person at BCH sees in this girl's file that she came in for X, got referred to the state, the state took her from her parents and that influences how they treat her going forward. This goes on and you get a heck of a feedback loop because everyone is just content to assume that the state and the experts know best and the parents are just whining about it. Nobody is in a position to evaluate the big picture and even if they do how do you stop the loop and say "hey wait, this looks wrong". I could fill a novel with all the sob stories like this that I know though most of them relate to drug addicts and the elderly so they wouldn't tug a heartstrings nearly as much as this story does. The culture of the state simply does not equip people in "the system" (both the government and private institutions like BCH) to doubt or re-evaluate the prior results of the system and the conditions of the state bureaucracy are not sufficient for the bureaucrats to reliably make the right calls the first (and often only) time around. It's sad but it is what it is. This is a complex problem that many societies grapple with and not the kind of thing any individual can change on their own.

Regarding Martin Gottesfeld, I am not informed enough to comment.

Do you have a link for the court decision? It's not clear how much proof did the hospital provide, and I guess the initial decision was a cautionary measure (because for the judge is safer to do something wrong than doing nothing and facing a tweetstorm in case there is a problem).

> I guess my point is just, don't be this clown.

I agree with that.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/julian-assange-went-after-a-fo...