Slashdot Mirror
Arrest Made In Webcam Highjacking Extortion Case
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "CNN reports that Jared James Abrahams, a 19-year-old computer science student, has been arrested for allegedly hijacking the webcams of young women — among them reigning Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf — taking nude images, then blackmailing his victims to send him more explicit material or else be exposed. Abrahams admitted he had 30 to 40 'slave computers' — or other people's electronic devices he controlled — and has had as many as 150 total. His arrest came six months after a teenager identified in court documents as C.W. alerted authorities. She has since publicly identified herself as Cassidy Wolf, the recently crowned Miss Teen USA. Wolf received messages featuring pictures of her at her Riverside County address and others apparently taken months earlier when she lived in Orange County, says the criminal complaint (PDF). The message explained 'what's going to happen' if Wolf didn't send pictures or videos or 'do what I tell you to do' in a five-minute Skype videoconference, according to the criminal complaint. 'Either you do one of the things listed below or I upload these pics and a lot more (I have a LOT more and those are better quality) on all your accounts for everybody to see and your dream of being a model will be transformed into a pornstar (sic),' wrote Abrahams. FBI agents raided Abrahams' Temecula home in June and seized computers and hardware, cellphones and hacking software, court records show. Outside the court, Abrahams' lawyer, Alan Eisner, said that his client's family feels 'profound regret and remorse' over what happened. Eisner told CNN affiliate KTLA that Abrahams is autistic. 'The family wants to apologize for the consequences of his behavior to the families who were affected.'"
The current excuse of the day when some nerdy low-life gets caught up to no good. Here is a hint, just because you have problems coping, it does not mean "I am autistic" is an excuse for being an arsehole.
since she didn't secure her computer enough
Well, here's hoping that Abrahams gets a fairly long sentence. Coercion and blackmail is coercion and blackmail, regardless of the circumstances.
Funny how being caught does that to people.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Someone with enough knowledge to commit this crime can't possibly hide behind autism as an excuse. This person formed intent, then a plan and executed the plan uncounted times. He communicated his intentions quite well which doesn't really point to autism. This young man is a sexual predator and probably always will be. Autism doesn't make you a pervert either, you have do that on your own.
I applaud this brave young lady for standing up to this creep. She did the right thing.
He should join the NSA once he's out of jail. He has a bright future there.
This is worse than bullying, it's sexual harassment and extortion.
And I agree, Ms. Wolf did a courageous thing to stand up and present evidence so this lowlife could be stopped.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
No - simply invoking the error chain, though I can see how that might come across in the reading. Take a link out of the error chain, any error chain (in flight collision, at-sea collision, ordnance mishap) and suddenly all you have is a close call instead of a headline. In similar fashion to the related story, taking certain precautions (full night of sleep, drink a six pack instead of a case, put down the phone instead of answering it mid-turn), keeps everyone out of harm's way. Tech is a tool - so are weapons. The user has certain responsibilities for both understanding and usage.
If his initials were NSA, would you really be surprised by this?
I can't be the only person who tapes over the camera in my laptop and disables it. Apparently my tin foil hat isn't tight enough, as I haven't unplugged the wires internally yet.
His lawyer is already bringing it up, as a possible mitigating factor. So slam him and his lawyer for bringing it up, not for Slashdot for providing details you find unfavorable.
Absolutely! But sadly, the world is full of unpleasant people who will get it into their heads that what they want, they must have, and devil-may-care about the consequences. I'm not about to leave my life savings in a box on my doorstep in the hopes that no one will steal it. I'm going to safeguard it in a vault or a bank (another topic for another thread, perhaps) because there are thieves afoot. My phone has a password on it because I'm not convinced the person to find it in case I misplace it won't be one to call Kenya on my dime. My car door is locked. The list goes on...
Actually what I think is the court should take into account is the fact that this person's brain is not developed yet which might lead him to do... that.. and think 1) it's a fine thing to do and 2) he'd get away with it.
He's 19. He is legally an adult and should have more than a well-enough developed brain to realize that sexually blackmailing women is wrong. Most people would easily grasp the concept years before.
That knocks out #1, which is really the only relevant point because you don't deserve any leeway for thinking that it's okay to do something wrong so long as you don't get caught for it. Poor impulse control and an inattention to the consequences of one's actions at that age is the opposite of a mitigating factor.
Everyone involved really ought to consider that before they put him in the no-rehab hell-on-earth called American prisons for 20 years and turn him into a REAL criminal.
This isn't just some little ha-ha prank or delinquency. He broke into a person's computer, commandeered it for his own amusement, and then threatened the future life and career of a woman if she refused to degrade herself for his sick sexual entertainment. The first half? Maybe your argument holds water. The second? That IS being a real criminal. This was sexual assault in all but contact -- that same sort sexual self-gratification through the control and degradation of an unwilling party.
I won't disagree that 20 years in the current system will do next to nothing to reform him or prepare him for better integration into society, but let's not pretend that he deserves to get special, kids-gloves attention just because the system is broken. What he did was flat out evil and deserves to be punished -- harshly -- by whatever standards we have as a society set for sexual predators and blackmailers. Because that is what he is.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
ArsTechnica covered this "epidemic" in March.
...
The Remote Administration Tool is the revolver of the Internet's Wild West.
The article is slightly sensationalist, but interesting
Perhaps law enforcement has opened a can of worms... or monkeys... autistic monkeys.
and that can be wor(s)e then doing jail time.
Sex offender status for life, And yes, that kind of probation is far more stringent than regular probation, and regular probation is not fun. Even if he gets a no jail deal, breaking any of probation's rules is enough to get him sent to a real jail cell. He will have to report whenever he's told to, if he doesn't, jail. He will be monitored for drugs/alcohol. Failing a test means jail. He will have to report his living address whenever he moves (if his probation officer permits him to move). If he doesn't, jail. Any other type of crime he may commit in the future while on probation will carry a heavier than normal sentence. He was studying computer science in college, that career is now out the window, and he'll probably have to stay off computers as part of his probation, so he will probably re-offend.
He has irrevocably changed the course of his very young and promising life, thinking he would never get caught. Lots of guys like him in jail who thought they were too good to get caught.
The reason that this story has the reference to autism in it is because the accused is attempting to use his alleged autism (I am going to assume that he has an actual diagnosis, not that it means he is actually autistic) as an excuse for his crimes. This story is actually a perfect example of what is wrong with the way our society (in general) is approaching autism. It is viewed as something which makes one unable to tell right from wrong. I do not actually believe that this man has autism, although I think it likely that he was diagnosed with it. This article does a good job of explaining what I am talking about.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
His whole plan just doesn't make sense. It relies on the victim to both have issues regarding nudity that cause them to actually believe that nude photos taken with a hacked computer are somehow blackmail material, and to also be willing to send far more explicit images or video for further blackmail purposes. The overlap of these sets has to be pretty small and only contain people with IQs below room temperature. As we see, not even a Miss Teen USA is that clueless.
When an attractive young girl accidently shows more of herself than she wants to, you need to be conscientious and respectful and look away.
When I show accidentally more of myself than I want to, you do not need to be respectful to look away. You will look away for your own sake, or what you see will be its own punishment.
I think y'all know what I'm getting at. You've seen Clockwork Orange.
Your liberal heart is ignoring the cynic that must be present as well. There's a high probability that this is NOT an autistic individual, merely a person who was diagnosed as autistic at the parents' wishes. This is a HUGE problem in America and one of the reasons that parents of truly autistic children have a hard time with the systems in place.
My anecdotal evidence for my view point is the fact that the lady who lived at the end of the block I grew up on had a son. That son was not diagnosed by their first physician, nor their second with autism. Finally, after 3, possibly 4 different physicians saw him, she found one that considered him autistic. After finding this, she decided that he needed special attention throughout school and, when the school district wouldn't give him the attention she felt he needed, she tried 4 different schools before she decided to home school him.
Now, this child (at the time I last saw him, he was approximately 8-10) is odd, and has some weird tendencies (at one point, their neighbor was selling their house and he went over and wrote in chalk on their driveway "WAY OVERPRICED"), I would describe him as socially inept, but he doesn't behave like other autistic children I've encountered. In fact, he doesn't behave like children or people with Asperger Syndrome even. My mother and I were walking our dog and he yelled out to us to say hi and ask if the dog had gone "poopie" yet. Anyone familiar with these disorders knows that this is unusual to the point of it being near impossible.
Moral of the story, if you look hard enough you can find someone who will say whatever you want them to, and if I were doing something like this and got caught, I'd make it a point to get at least one person to claim me mentally deranged.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
I agree with others that the autism excuse is a little too convenient. But what I wanted to mention is that anyone who says "I have a LOT more of these that are better quality" whether the goal is political, bragging at a share site, or the vilest of extortion, they're always lying. If they had better quality photos, they'd have shown them to you. If the creep is trying to extort based on one or two blurry low light screenshots, chances approach certainty that it's all he has.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Actually what I think is the court should take into account is the fact that this person's brain is not developed yet which might lead him to do... that.. and think 1) it's a fine thing to do and 2) he'd get away with it.
He's 19. He is legally an adult and should have more than a well-enough developed brain to realize that sexually blackmailing women is wrong. Most people would easily grasp the concept years before.
That knocks out #1, which is really the only relevant point because you don't deserve any leeway for thinking that it's okay to do something wrong so long as you don't get caught for it. Poor impulse control and an inattention to the consequences of one's actions at that age is the opposite of a mitigating factor.
Agreed.
What scares me a little was the article earlier this week where the government wants to consider people juveniles up to age 25. Different context, but I wonder when this thought process will spill into the criminal justice realm.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I agree with the article in Salon. Autism spectrum disorder is an overused diagnosis.
HOWEVER that does not mean it's not a real phenomena. I have a son who was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. There are several clear differences between him and my other children (who are bright geeky types) including a near eidetic memory and slowness processing spoken language. You might not notice it in a casual context, but it becomes pretty apparent over time.
I am still pissed off at Slashdot publishing this summary in this manner. This shit of a lawyer is still engaging in adverse profiling and contributing to a body of ideas that has no justification.
Austic my arse. Just another excuse. Darryl Hannah now claims to be autistic. A way into the limelight. This punk did wrong, period. But, if he IS autistic you can bet that he will probably get a short probation and fine.
This was *not* about seeing naked girls. As we all know, there is more highly detailed porn on the internet than one person could experience in a lifetime. (Probably. I haven't, like, taken an inventory. But evidence indicates this is the case.)
This was about control. It was very specifically about the feeling of control experienced when forcing someone to do an act they find disgusting.
He wasn't trying to see his victims naked. He could have seen tens of thousands of girls naked for free on the internet. He was very specifically attempting to gain control over his victims, to make them do something that revolted them.
I wonder how his lawyer is going to try to spin this.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I don't think it's a reasonable legal requirement to presume that every lens in your household must covered at all times. I also don't think it's reasonable to expect me to lock my closet doors, just because hey maybe someone snuck into my house while I was away and is in my closet. Do you sweep your house for bugs twice a day? Do you test your milk for poison before you eat a bowl of cereal, just in case someone put cyanide in it?
In my opinion it would be much better just to prosecute the perverts who illegally hack into personal computers and take surreptitious pictures of unsuspecting victims.
I like looking at naked women, I will admit.
So do I, but man, there's a whole lot of much easier and cheaper ways to look at digital images of naked women, even in real time.
Hell, redirect that kind of effort, and who knows, he might have even been able to get laid by a flesh and blood woman.
Stories like this certainly seem to confirm the notion that sex crimes are more about power than about sex.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Unlike a lot of you who are so free with your sadistically joyous
comments about sending someone to prison, I HAVE BEEN to prison.
That means that unlike you I actually KNOW what prison is like from
having been there. It is very different from any portrayal on TV or in
a movie, though "The Shawshank Redemption" comes closest to
capturing the vibe of being an inmate.
Someone who is weird or mentally weak will not do well in the prison
environment and they may not even live through the experience unless
they are in protective custody.
It is obvious the guy who perpetrated the stuff described in the summary
needs help, and certainly he needs to be shown in a definitive manner that
what he did is not accepted by society. There are other ways to do this
which can be as effective as prison and more likely to produce a positive
outcome. I'd suggest denial of computer access for a period of time and
a GPS ankle bracelet for the defendant, along with some sort of work
program which forces him to perform some sort of labor which benefits
society.
Prison doesn't ever "fix" people or "teach them a lesson". Prison damages
people. When people are not going to be in prison for their entire lives it
really is in the best interest of society to use other solutions than prison
if the goal is punishment and reform of the offender. And until YOU have
been in prison yourself, you really have no business suggesting that prison is
the best answer for a criminal offense which has other possible solutions,
because you don't know what you are talking about, period.
'
I think the essential thing to understand is that people have different abilities and needs. No category is quite adequate. I have trouble with speech, but unlike your son, apparently, I have almost no "mind's eye" at all, and a terrible memory for anything that I can't logically relate to other facts or feel in a musical way. I don't think that necessarily means that he's more or less genuinely Asperger's than I am. One of my three children has trouble with speech also, and is overly affectionate with strangers by most people's standards. He is very different from me in a lot of equally significant ways. Some people have characterized my social skills as Asperger's like, but I think the main difference is I have less of a veneer of pretense over everything. I actually don't think I'm lacking in social skills or social perceptiveness at all, relatively speaking. I think that slick, salesman types have just been more successful at getting their particular strengths and characteristics defined as the norm. (Though the 'sociopath' category is a win for my team I suppose.) One of my other children has freakishly good language and social skills: he was able to BS comfortably with adults as if he were a peer when he was 2. I don't think this is a syndrome either though, just something he's really good at, and strengths almost always come with other weaknesses and tradeoffs. He's smart, but his 'Asperger's-like brother is smarter in some ways, and that intelligence has a deep connection to his speech difficulty, in my opinion. He finds it harder to put things into words in part because he's able to think in ways that don't map neatly into a string of grammatical concepts. People are complicated machines, and in everyone a lot of small pieces are broken or don't work well, and other interrelated pieces that may be genius. It just may or may not be recognized depending on how externally obvious those pieces are.
So you're telling me that when 2 out of 3 doctors do not diagnose autism, it means the 3rd must be right? You, as someone presumably scientifically oriented in nature, should look at that factor and start questioning whether that's true. Furthermore, the fact that the child has been told he's socially awkward, raised as though he is autistic, sheltered from the rest of the world, and there is 0 interaction with his age group whatsoever, the likelihood, in my book, is that his traits come from an overbearing mother.
To me, and knowing what I know about the mother, she's the type that follows the belief that the rain dance works. Of course the rain dance works, it works because the Native Americans didn't stop until it rained, which was bound to happen eventually, whether it was an hour later or a month and a half later. You search under enough rocks and you'll find just about anything. She merely asked enough doctors to agree with her and found that it was true in the eyes of one of them.
Now, I know a decent number of people with autism and people with Aspgerer's. One of them, I see on a semi-regular basis. He makes it out to my facility about once every other year and the conversations, as well as the interactions, are frightfully difficult for him. You can see it in his mannerisms as well as if you every try shake his hand. He cannot handle it, but he has overcome many issues and has even made a speech to, not only a group of people, but the general public. If you want to see the man I'm speaking of and the speech I'm talking about, it's readily available here (1:05ish-3:10ish). In it, he address the public in thanks for a Technical Grammy.
While I do not doubt your statements about yourself and others, you can call me a cynic as much as you like, but I find it extremely hard to believe that at least two different doctors, two different school districts' special ed specialists (who handle a number of autistic students) as well as a private school's specialist all considered this boy to be non-autistic. Furthermore he was capable of, socially awkward, but standard communication via conversation, I consider it his mother shopping for autism in her child (which there is a push for in this damned country because parents want their children treated as special in the school districts). The father has left them and wants nothing to do with her or the child (since before he was diagnosed with autism from my understanding).
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
If he is a detriment to society because he is a psychopath he should be off the street. If he is a detriment to society because of something about his autism, he should be off the street. If he is a detriment to society because he does criminal things, no matter what his condition or excuse, he should be off the streets. Actions over-ride excuses.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Pics or it didn't happen.
No left turn unstoned.