Judge Rejects Guilty Plea From AOL Employee

The Hobo writes "Newsday has a story on a New York judge who rejected Jason Smather's guilty plea. Smathers, covered previously on Slashdot, was the AOL employee who stole and sold AOL addresses to spammers. The judge himself apparently cancelled his AOL subscription due to receiving too much spam. While he didn't like what Jason did, he wasn't convinced a crime had been committed under the CAN-SPAM law, which requires that a person be deceived."

Comments

But will he be charged with theft?

[Antony-Kyre]

He stole a list of e-mail addresses. Isn't that theft? Even if he doesn't get charged with sending out spam, he did commit other crimes, right?

CAN-SPAM

[FiReaNGeL]

Maybe a crime hasn't been committed against this (obscure) law, but stealing critical info from the company you're working for and selling it to the highest bidder (or in this case, spammer) sure is. Was he accused of the wrong thing or what?

I wonder if AOL users

[multiplexo]

could band together and sue this guy and the asshole he sold the list to in civil court with a class action lawsuit. Nail him to the tune of a few billion dollars just to add insult to injury. Of course he should first spend some time in a nice secure federal pound-me-in-the-ass penitentiary. Having his anus blown out and being several billion dollars in debt would be just punishment and a fine deterrent.

Nice to know that judge respects the law

[Software]

It's good to know that the judge respects and applies the law _as written_, and doesn't try to punish the defendant because he (the defendant) is a total scumbag.

I would rather the law had been written such that selling legitimate addresses to spammers was punishable by death, but that's not the way it happened. So, given that the CAN-SPAM law doesn't prohibit selling addresses to spammers (which may or may not be true), it seems like the right decision.

By the way, this guy needs a new defense lawyer. BADLY.

Re:Does not compute

[jhigh]

You don't know for a fact that he had no permission from the company to access this data. If another employee gave him the access code they are, like it or not, they are being granted a license to access what ever data and resources are associated with that account. This would be *stupid* and ground for dismissal but in it self hardly a criminal act.

And this is why security policies are so important. If AOL's security policy explicitly states that no user is allowed to access another user's account, even if that user was given the password, then it is illegal because it would be unauthorized use of a computer. The computer doesn't belong to the user, and therefore the user has no right to authorize anyone else to use their account. It all depends on what AOL has stated in their security policy.