Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Doesn't seem like such a good idea now does it?
If he was charged with 'interstate transportation of stolen property', does that mean that he printed out all 92 million screen names and took them in his car across state borders?
Do the crime, pay the time.
I'm not sure how he's going to pay $200k+ though.
Sorry, couldn't help it...
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Textual representations of AOL customenrs email addresses are considered AOL's property? As much as I hate spammers, that is insane.
Maybe, they'd learn that when spamming, the sysadmin wins.
Fight Spammers!
The guy who gives the email addresses to the spammers is forced to pay restitution costs to AOL for the amount they spent on dealing with email that the spammer's sent. This is bullshit. If anyone should have to pay, it is the spammers. The guy can go to jail for theft of property (if you consider email lists property... which the government seems to... but this is another issue), but he didn't directly cost AOL any money. This is a crap example of a big company getting money from this little guy because getting the money from the spammers is nigh impossible. He plead guilty, so I think that keeps him from being able to appeal.
*yawn*
We who RTFA do.
$28,000
'You've got male!'
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
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
'transportation of stolen property'
More like 'transportation of copied property'.
No such law.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
It may be nothing to you, but when 80% of all email is spam, and when legitimate emails are filtered out, and when email becomes essentially useless, nearly everyone else disagrees.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I wonder if users can sue AOL for not taking proper precautions (obviously the assumption here is that they didnt)
Damn, man. The guy deserves a thank you. Those casino sites rock. Really.
Sshh, dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your spam. I love it. I'm having spam spam spam spam spam spam spam beaked beans spam spam spam and spam!
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
If this wasn't about spam, people on here would be jumping up and down screaming their guts out about how the punishment doesn't fit the crime.
$400k for 92 million screen names? That's less than a half-cent per compromised screen name- what a deal! The year in prison is on top of that but that's probably on the order of magnitude of about $500k (judging from how much you'd have to pay me to go) so we're still at less than a cent per screen name. Ask anyone whose screen name was compromised, with a punishment of less than a cent. This guy got off easy.
For christ's sake, spam is NOT that big of a deal.
Yes it is.
" 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.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Fucking ream the shit out of the murderers and child rapists with broomsticks and they'll never rape again.
Uh, who do you think is doing the raping? Nuns with dildos? It's murderers and rapists plying their trade in the big house.
A prison is supposed to be a place of punishment.
Not necessarily. There are a number of philosophies regarding the reason for prisons; other than punishment, prisons can be said to be places of rehabilitation, places to simply remove the dangerous element from society, and probably other things.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
"As I understand it Facts are not copyrightable. A huge list of email addresses is just a big list of facts. If they can't have a copyright on the list of email addresses they can't assert that they've been stolen."
I'm not sure how you made that last logical connection. This isn't a copyright infringement case; it's one of trade secrets and proprietary information. This is the modern equivalent of the old days where somebody might sneak out a big list of customer names and snail-mail addresses -- they're not copyrightable either, but it sure as hell is legally actionable.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
In November of 2003 I was getting about 175 spams per day. In December of 2003 I installed Spamassassin, set up ip# and domain name block lists, tweaked the rules and wrote my own, and wrote a user email/spam report system. I spent a good deal of time getting this set up and working out the bugs. My email server received over 145,000 connections in 2004, over 143,000 were spam.
I have the ability and resources to do these things but many internet users do not. While I don't have an AOL account, I still think he should have received more hard time. Put him away for a long time, maybe his cell mate will be a disgruntled AOL user who lost it after getting "one too many spams".... make other spammers and their helpers think twice.
Yes, that's why it's called the Dept. of Corrections. Not that they do much rehabilitation or corrections these days, but that is in the name.
"He infringed a trade secret"
You can't infringe a trade secret. You can steal a trade secret, you can misappropriate a trade secret, but you can't infringe a trade secret.
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
Hey man, you and the rest of the hang the spammers crowd need to realise that it cuts both ways. If you want a free and open Internet you have to accept the spam. Don't like spam? Then don't give out your E-mail address to people likely to spam you. Still get spam? Write yourself a spam filter.
I don't like spam, but I'd rather have spam than an over-regulated Internet and I think that spending 5 minutes of my time each day dealing with the spam that gets through the filters is much better than some guy having to go to prison with all the psychological torment that might/will cause, not only to him but his innocent family and friends as well. Not to mention that sending people to prison harms the economy.
I haven't heard anything against the Vegas company that purchased this information. Why is it OK for a company to carry out these acts but if a citizen does the same acts, he/she is fined a few hundred grand and sent to jail for a year or two?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
You are correct. This site has some good information including some applicable federal statutes involving theft of trade secrets and economic espionage. This guy was looking at up to 10 years in prison and 500K in fines so he got off relativly lightly. I never knew that theft of trade secrets carried criminal attachment, I thought it was purely a civil tort, shows how much you might not know about the law if you're not a lawyer.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
But cop-killers are at the top of the heap, and are looked up to. They don't take kindly to -some- types of f'ed up behavior, and very kindly to others. Please don't make it out as though jailhouse beatings and rape are meted out according to the severity of the prisoner's crime-they're generally meted out according to opportunity and physical strength, or lack thereof.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
so easy to abuse, no wonder it's number one!
I've been a felon for wire fraud since i was thirteen, nuttin happened to me other than 29 months in wales detention in wisconsin and 29 months in a group home ( www.norriscenter.org ) and 3 years probation. I'm 17 in 2 days. I paid(well, my parents) paid $201,000 in court fees and restitution. we are broke now. :(