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41 Months In Prison For Man Who Leaked AT&T iPad Email Addresses
In 2010, querying a public AT&T database yielded over 114,000 email address for iPad owners who were subscribed to the carrier. One of the people who found these emails, Andrew 'weev' Auernheimer, sent them to a news site to publicize AT&T's security flaw. He later ended up in court for his actions. Auernheimer was found guilty, and today he was sentenced to 41 months in prison. 'Following his release from prison, Auernheimer will be subject to three years of supervised release. Auernheimer and co-defendant Daniel Spitler were also ordered to pay $73,000 in restitution to AT&T. (Spitler pled guilty in 2011.) The pre-sentencing report prepared by prosecutors recommended four years in federal prison for Auernheimer.' A journalist watching the sentencing said, 'I felt like I was watching a witch trial as prosecutors admitted they didn't understand computers.'
1. Popular or not I feel he deserved what he got for linking himself to the leak, he could've just as easily leaked it anonymously, I'm willing to bet the prosecutions main argument wasn't about the poor users, but at&t's hurt reputation.
2. It sounds like he needed a better lawyer to explain the public availability of the database, but that yields a more interesting question: in the case of IT incompetency, is it the hacker's fault for taking the public information, or the IT's dept fault for exposing it? Sounds like more of a moral question than a legal one. But to simplify things, say I left a pile of gold in the street, I can't have any expectation it'll be there tomorrow, the streets not mine, but say I left it in my yard, and it's unfenced, to get it, you have to trespass + it's on my property. That's what this guy did, he trespassed and took it, but he took it through a public API, so it could be argued he didn't know any better, but when he went to publish it... that's where the headlines comes into place.