UK Anonymous Hacktivists Get Jail Time

twoheadedboy writes "Two members of the Anonymous hacking collective have been handed a total of 25 months in prison. Christopher Weatherhead, a 22-year-old who went under the pseudonym Nerdo, received the most severe punishment — 18 months in prison. Another member, Ashley Rhodes, was handed seven months, whilst Peter Gibson was given a six-month suspended sentence. They were convicted for hitting a variety of websites, including those belonging to PayPal and MasterCard."

Comments

I've seen this movie!

[localman57]

Peter Gibson was given a six-month suspended sentence.

He has lived a trite and meaningless life. Oh, wait. No. That's Gibbons, not Gibson.

Re:I've seen this movie!

[localman57]

Only if he violates probation and has to serve his sentence. BTW, over there they call it National-Pound-Me-In-Me-Bum-Jail.

Re:I've seen this movie!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we don't.

You can keep prison-rape as a predominantly US phenomenon.

I do have a question on the subject...

Rape is terrible, we all know it's a horrible crime. Why when someone convicted of a crime, especially non-violent, is it suddenly a hilarious prospect?

Re:I've seen this movie!

[HaZardman27]

Because it serves to keeping the American population docile about our terrible justice system. If you think about the (far too many) inmates in prison as people who may be serving time unjustly or at least disproportionately to their crimes, you might get upset and expect change. If you think of them as animals who are getting raped as a form of penance to society, then you can blissfully go back to living in ignorance.

Re:I've seen this movie!

[Sabriel]

Dark humour can act as a coping mechanism. We can't, or don't want to, deal with the true awfulness of something, so we make fun of it.

Re:I've seen this movie!

[rich_hudds]

Completely agree.

The USA is possibly the only country in the world where more men are raped than women.

The threat of rape helps force innocent people to take a plea bargain. Plea bargaining being another outrage that the USA blindly accepts but which most civilised countries severely limit.

Combined Total?

[rjstanford]

When multiple people are convicted of different things, listing their punishment as a "total" serves purely to make the story more lurid and, thus, to make whatever possibly reasonable point the author intended seem more likely to be incorrect. "Two of the three people credited with hacking financial networks received jail sentences, the longest for 18 months" would still be silly wording but at least not a blatent attempt to exaggerate.

Re:Yeah Right

[Trepidity]

It's fairly common for these kinds of nonsense figures to include: 1) the cost of doing stuff they would've needed to do anyway, like fix misconfigurations or patch security holes; and 2) salaries for regular staff who would've been paid the salary either way, like a sysadmin who had to take some time away from posting on Slashdot to respond to the incident.

Re:Wow, pretty severe

[Enderandrew]

I believe the primary difference in the Mastercard and PayPal DDOS attacks is that they weren't just tryng to take down a website, but rather they attacked the domains that provided APIs to process payments. They were literally trying to disrupt business transactions.

They were not successful in fully bringing down either.

I also object to calling any criminal hacking "hacktivism". A legal protest can be more effective. They didn't advance their beliefs or causes, though they did break the law.

Re:So what is so great about Anonymous?

[Enderandrew]

This is unfortunately flawed thinking.

The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend or a good guy. Just because someone like Assange doesn't like the US government, or banks or whoever else you hate, doesn't make him a saint. Just because Anonymous decided to support WikiLeaks didn't make them saints either.

They attacked PBS for crying out loud, just because PBS aired a documentary that tried to present both sides of the Assange debate.

That isn't supporting any ideal of transparency. That is acting childish.