Alleged eBay Hacker Goofs up and Goes to Jail

juliao writes "SecurityFocus is reporting that alleged eBay hacker Jerome Heckenkamp was jailed after his first solo court appearance." It's pretty funny actually, stuff like challenging the indictment on the grounds that they typed his name in all capital letters, demanding to immediately testify (even tho they were only there to schedule the trial), threatening the judge and so on. He would know better if he watched a couple episodes of Law & Order. Note that I base all court proceedings on the wisdom of Sam Watterston.

Comments

AKA - MagicFX

[keep_it_simple_stupi]

Jerome Heckenkamp, aka MagicFX, also brought down a major porn site not too long ago, redirecting visitors to Disney's website.

I like his style!

More info here.

The capital letters issue

[zzyzx]

Believe it or not, the names in all capital letters is one of the things that conspiracy theorists try to use. A fun read is the destroyed arguments section of the Dixieland Law Journal. That page is a conspiracy site telling other conspiracy people that they're being a little too out there. The capital letters issue is explained and debunked at a link there.

Re:A fool for a client

[Madduck]

According to the Quotable Lawyer, edited by David Shrager and Elizabeth
Frost, New England Publishing Associates, Inc., 1986, p. 49, that saying is
a proverb apparently so old that its original author is not known. They
quote it as, "He that is his own lawyer has a fool for a client." They cite
Rosalind Fergusson, The Facts on File Dictionary of Proverbs, 1983.

Re:or militia movement

[gorilla]

It wasn't a case of 'too much', early computers simply could not handle mixed case. ASCII-1963 only had defined character positions for A to Z, as did Sixbit encoding. ASCII-1963 was extended in 1967 to encode a to z as well, but sixbit simply couldn't. There were only 63 possible codes, 26 for letters, 10 for numerals, 17 for other characters, and the remaining 10 for control codes. That left no space to encode the lower case letters too.

Sixbit is ultimatly why MS-DOS had 3 name extensions and wasn't case sensitive. 3 sixbit characters fit very nicely into 18 bits, and early DEC computers were 18 bit systems. CP/M was developed to be partially a lookalike of these DEC computers, and MS-DOS was initially a clone of CP/M.

Re:two kinds of insanity

[ninewands]

Keep in mind there are two different sanity defenses:

1) being insane at the time of the act

2) being insane at the time of the trial

Errrrrmmmm ... no.

The insanity defense goes to the existence of a culpable mind state at the time of the alleged offense, ONLY. It is an affirmative defense to criminal liability (which means that even if the defendant did the deed exactly as he is accused of having done, he cannot be guilty because he was insane and, therefore, lacked a culpable mind-state).

Insanity at the time of the trial is "lack of competency to stand trial" and merely postpones the proceedings until the defendant can be rendered competent by therapy, drugs, ECT, whatever the psychiatric community's "silver bullet du jour" might be. It does nothing to keep you from going to prison.

As I see it, this guy is merely showing his complete contempt for the law, the proceedings and the court. That being said, I hope he likes coveralls, because the attitude he seems to display is going to have him wearing them for quite a while.

Serious Psychological Difficulties

[penguin_nipple]

This guy isn't just eccentric, from what the article is suggesting, he has symptoms of Oppositional Defiant Disorder and/or Oppositional Conduct Disorder. These are real disorders, which affect people across a broad range of society. Here's some info on ODD have a peek and tell me this guy is not suffering from a psychological disorder.

For those of you who would rather not click through:

A pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least six months during which four or more of the following are present:

1. often loses temper
2. often argues with adults
3. often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults' requests or rules
4. often deliberately annoys people
5. often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
6. is often touchy or easily annoyed by others
7. is often angry and resentful
8. is often spiteful and vindictive

Although the website has more info.

P.S. funny how that brief view of ODD describes alot of slashdot users! hahaha...smile, it's a joke

Re:Idiot legal arguments: capitalized name

[MillionthMonkey]

Some tax evader arguments are really funny. They always start with something like a clerical error, then build up and up- and in the middle, you hear something like "...and therefore the entire federal government is illegitimate...". They all end the same way- nobody owes any taxes.
I especially like this one: Is U.S. income tax invalid because Ohio wasn't legally a state when the 16th amendment was ratified? On the 150th anniversary of Ohio's statehood, someone looked in the archives and realized that there had been an oversight, and that Ohio had never been formally admitted to the Union. (Statehood admission was handled much more casually back in 1803.) So in 1953 they introduced a bill making Ohio a state, retroactively until 1803. The tax evaders say that since Congress can't make laws ex post facto, Ohio wasn't a state all those years. The ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1911 was therefore invalid, because it was introduced to Congress by the Taft administration, and Taft couldn't legally be president since he was born in Cincinatti and was therefore not a citizen.
There's another rumor going around about how the IRS is paying reparations for slavery to anyone who can prove they're descended from slaves. And I remember hearing once about how "all taxes are voluntary", but I forget the details of how that one works.