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Fired AOL Engineer gets 15 Months

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the forward-to-the-big-house dept.

n3hat writes "A former America Online software engineer was sentenced to 15 months in prison for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers who sent out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mail messages, according to this A.P. story in the Baltimore Sun."

11 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. Why jail? by Eightyford · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've never understood why non-violent criminals are even put into jail. Instead of us taxpayers paying about 25 grand a year for this guy(a number I pulled directly out of my ass, by the way); he should be forced to repay the damage that he has done. And, if it takes the rest of his life, then so be it; just don't let the guy declare bankruptcy (another thing I've never really understood).

    Anyways, save jail for the murderers, rapists, and child molesters of the world. Make people like this guy, Martha Stewart, and Bernie Ebbers repay they're debt in other more productive ways.

    --
    Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
    1. Re:Why jail? by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Repayment is only a deterrent if the perp has been less than successful. A millionaire spammer (Richter?) could consider that just the cost of business, and be on his merry way.

    2. Re:Why jail? by dal20402 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I agree with you that, in general, too many people are in jail.

      But in cases of very costly (to the rest of us) and profitable (to the perp) white-collar crime, there is very little else that can serve as a deterrent. White-collar criminals tend to have a different attitude from low-level drug offenders: they aren't desperate or sick, and don't even recognize that what they're doing is wrong. Instead, they feel no guilt about gaming the system in any way possible (speaking in generalities, of course).

      If you fine them, they'll hide their money (as another poster said). If you try to leverage their knowledge, they'll fail to cooperate. As long as you let them have their freedom, they'll find a way to beat you. The way to make them think twice is to take away their freedom.

      If we put one white-collar perp in jail for every five low-level drug offenders we let out and put into intensive treatment programs, we'd make the market a more honest place and solve a lot of social problems at the same time.

  2. The truth of the matter is... by jhfry · · Score: 4, Insightful

    of those 92 million, only about 2 million actually use aol mail... the rest are people who used up thier free trial and moved on.

    I mean seriously, you expect me to believe that AOL has 92 million paying customers?

    Honestly if I were a spammer, I'd only pay half price for AOL addresses, the odds of someone reading your email (especially after filtering) is nearly zero.

    --
    Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
  3. Read TFA by Alomex · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you read TFA you'll see that the AOLer got off easy because he pleaded guilty very early on. In contrast this Kevin Mitnick nitwit is even now trying to play the victim and not really sounding contrite about it.

  4. Next by TRRosen · · Score: 4, Insightful
    what I want to know is when we can expect to hear about the conviction of the spammers he sold to. Obviously due to the size of the database (every AOL member ever apparently) they knew it was stolen. So we should see several spammers charged with 92,000,000 counts of recieving stolen merchandise right???

    OK - no chance of the government being that smart... but it would be nice.

  5. Re:Hypothetical Prison Conversation by mhearne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If I had to go to jail for a cybercrime, I would at least want the other inmates to understand the charge.

    15 months really isn't that bad, he'll probably do a third of that with good time (5 months). But he'll have to be on probation for years, and nobody worth working for is going to want to let him do anything more than stuff resistors in circuit boards.

    The trouble that comes after prison is often worse than doing the time itself.

    Michael

  6. Re:Ahh.... by Mahtar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, hilarious. He desereved to be gang raped and/or forced to perform sexual favors for his crime that physicall harmed no one.

    Also I guess I missed where the judge included "rape" in the 15 month jail sentence.

    Internet tough guys, huh?

  7. Re:Lemme get this straight by firewrought · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Mitnick didn't steal anything? Mitnick allegedly copied and removed....software valued at $2,100,000.00.

    I hate to take Kevin's side on this because his actions were illegal and immoral. However, it's very important to accurately appraise the costs (financial, emotional, cultural, etc.) of a crime. If the costs are exaggerated then justice is miscarried, tax money is misspent, the public is misserved, and third parties--such as policy makers, security analysts, and insurance companies--are misinformed.

    The $2.1 billion number represents the cost to make the software. If Mitnick merely made an unauthorized copy, burned it to CD, and shoved it in a drawer somewhere, what part of that $2.1 billion did the companies lose? None. Nada. Business would continue uninterrupted.

    Alternatively, suppose that Mitnick managed to destroy every copy of the software that the company owned. That would make the $2.1 billion a much more accurate assessment. The business could go bankrupt.

    And then there's the middle ground... what about leaking secrets to competitors or providing binaries to black-market distributors? These are things that chip away at that $2.1 billion, but it's unlikely they erode it completely.

    Of course, we haven't discussed administrative costs associated with mopping up and responding to the Mitnick incidents. We haven't factored in the intangible losses to privacy or even the hidden gains that might have come from the crime (e.g., if benign criminals attack you early and force you to beef up your security before the truly malignant ones arrive, haven't you inadvertly made money?)

    A true valuation is perhaps impossible, but we can be more accurate than to assume that the unauthorized copying of private/proprietary information is directly equivalent to the theft of physical goods.

    --
    -1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
  8. Re::-) I hope you too get assraped :~P by Adnuo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I actually registered to reply to this. I'm really glad that someone finally stopped the "ZOMG i hope j00 get t3h raped in teh assz0r LOLOLOL spammar!" comments and brought a real light to the situation. Sorry, sodomy isn't a joke. Just glad someone said it :)

  9. He *did* represent a physical threat by Solandri · · Score: 5, Insightful
    7 billion spams. Say 99% of them were caught by spam filters or went to bogus addresses. That leaves 70 million spams people had to deal with by hand. If it took one second to delete each of those spams, that means he cost everyone an aggregate 2.2 years of life. If someone imprisoned you in front of a computer hitting delete over and over for 2.2 years, wouldn't you consider him to be a physical threat to you and others?

    Why is it that people think a distributed crime is any less of a crime? Do you think it'd be OK if he stole $130,000 from a bank? Then why do you think it's OK that he stole $0.0019 each (1 second's wages at $6.75/hr) from 70 million people? They work out to the same amount of money.