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Botnet Spammer Gets Just 18 Months For Being Odd
itwbennett writes "Thirty-three-year old Scottsman Matthew Anderson was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison for orchestrating a malicious Trojan campaign in 2006. The reason for his relatively light sentence? He apparently wasn't seeking to maximize profit like any normal, red-blooded hacker. Also, his timing was good. His arrest in June 2006 predated by a matter of months the Police and Justice Act, which would likely have resulted in a harsher sentence. By comparison, David Kernell, who snooped in Sarah Palin's email, got a year in prison."
Take a look at his crimes without the veil of judgment. He did some pretty neato stuff.
He found a way to run his code on a huge number of computers without the owners knowing at all.
He learned how to control the PC cameras of those computers and had "eyes" everywhere.
He ran this all from his mom's tiny little living room.
He's a modern-day phracker. He's doing stuff that is way out there, taking over peoples' PCs, controlling their systems, and he did it all for the love of technology. If he was alive 30 years ago, he'd have been whistling into the handset receivers of payphones to get free long distance from Ma Bell.
Yes, we need to condemn him because he crossed the line. Genius should be tempered with good sense, and it looks like he got carried away with what he *could* do and didn't contemplate hard enough on what he *shouldn't* do. However, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. His heart is in the right place. What he needs is better guidance.
"As this case shows, criminals can't hide online and are being held to account for their actions. A complex investigation like this demonstrates what international cooperation can achieve," said Detective Constable Bob Burls of the UK Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), neatly ignoring the fact that few online criminals are ever caught and it has taken over four years to sentence Anderson.
If criminals without a profit motive are a harder nut to crack, maybe they need to be punished more severely, not less, one would think.
I don't see why premeditated murder should be treated differently from a crime of passion. Murder is murder.
A crime of passion is in fact planned. A person knows exactly under what circumstances he would kill, and does so when circumstances arise which fit that pattern. Merely, such a killer perhaps does not think /specifically/ about a given situation. Thinking like ``I would kill a person in such and such relation to me if they did such and such'' is no less evil than ``I will kill because of ...''. It's the same. One is merely an instantiation of the other by the substitution of concretes.
The whole rhetoric about premeditation is nonsense. I believe that every crime of passion is deeply rooted in the personality of the killer, moulded since birth.
Punishing apparently planned killings more severely clearly sends the message that a "thought crime" occurs when one is planning a killing which does not occur when a killing is done with a blank mind, on an apparent emotional whim.
The difference in punishment precisely corresponds to what the thought-crime is worth by itself.