Guilty Plea in AOL Engineer's Address Theft Case

ScentCone writes "Jason Smathers, a former AOL software engineer has pleaded guilty in his theft of 92 million in-house account screen names. He'll be paying $200-400k, and serving a year or two of federal time. Smathers used another employee's account to steal the data, and sold it to a Vegas-based online casino operator. Interestingly, one of the charges was 'interstate transportation of stolen property.'"

Comments

What?

[VeryApt]

Textual representations of AOL customenrs email addresses are considered AOL's property? As much as I hate spammers, that is insane.

I'd like to know

[www.sorehands.com]

I'd like to know which gambling sites that this was used to promote. I'd love to file lawsuits against some of these spamming, gambling, sites.

Maybe, they'd learn that when spamming, the sysadmin wins.

Re:That's federal pound me in the ass prison.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't it seem wrong that extra-judicial rape in our prison system is not only tolerated, but sort of cheered on?

Why don't we just go to a system of corporeal punishment, like in Singapore? At least there, the amount of physical punishment you take bears some relationship to the crime you've committed, whereas in our system you're punished according to your physical strength, ability to join a gang, etc. that have nothing to with the severity of the crime you've committed.

If you think prison rape is just fine, then you should stop kidding yourself and start advocating an official corporeal punishment system. There are not disadvantages to the system we currently have. It's much fairer. If you find this argument absurd and/or don't want to repeal the 8th amendment, then you should not sit idly by and let this absurdity rage on unabated.

mandatory restitution?

[brian.glanz]

Smathers is only paying "the amount the government estimates AOL spent as a result of the e-mails," which is that $200,000 to $400,000. Is our government unable to represent those who suffered significantly more harm than AOL, the people?

Sufferers may primarily be AOLamers and maybe all of us here will laugh that off to some extent, but consider "The stolen list of 92 million AOL addresses included multiple addresses used by each of AOL's estimated 30 million customers. It is believed to be still circulating among spammers." AOLamers or not, these are our grandparents and grade school teachers; training-wheeled users who if anything, need more protection than we do.

This penalty does them no good, whatsover. TFA makes it clear that a signficant number of them are still getting ruined by the crime, as_we_type. IANAL; can someone add whether "the people" can expect to be served a piece of Smathers?

If this is it, it sure as hell isn't what I'd call "restitution." Anyone want to wager that we also get nothing out of Sean Dunaway, the guy to whom Smathers sold?

BG

Re:But wait...

[shark72]

" Its not theft, right? AOL wasn't deprived of any property!"

If you use the Slashdot groupthink definition of "stolen property," well then sure. You often see this come up in Slashdot discussions regarding copyright protection. Nonetheless, in the world of trade secrets, mailing lists, and the like, these are the terms that are used. If you leave a company and take with you a copy of a customer list, trade secret, or other confidential or proprietary information, you cannot use the "the company still has a copy so I didn't deprive them of anything" defense. In the real world, this claim can get you a +5, Astute from the Slashdot crowd, but that's about it.