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Anonymous Member Sentenced For Joining DDoS Attack For One Minute
jfruh writes "One of the most potent aspects of Anonymous is, well, its anonymity — but that isn't absolute. Eric Rosol was caught by federal authorities participating in a DDoS attack on a company owned by Koch Industry; for knocking a website offline for 15 minutes, Rosol got two years of probation and had to pay $183,000 in restitution (the amount Koch paid to a security consultant to protect its website ater the attack)."
The worst part? From the article: "Eric J. Rosol, 38, is said to have admitted that on Feb. 28, 2011, he took part in a denial of service attack for about a minute on a Web page of Koch Industries..."
These people need to learn what actual violence against them and their property is, so that proportionate responses have value.
If your entire life is going to be ruined for any sort of protest, the natural incentive is to go in for intimidation, murder, arson, whatever to make their lives really hell instead.
Financial penalties should be proportional:
- how many others participated in this DDOS? divide by that number
- how long were other machines involved in this? divide by that time
- how fast was his internet connection in comparison to the others? divide by that
He admitted to guilt, but it's not fair to hold him completely financially responsible simply because he was the only person they were able to catch and was honest enough to confess.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Charging the defendants with the cost of 'fixing' their web site is bogus, because they should have had that done in the first place to prevent themselves from being open to attack
Proportionality is important, too. His punishment was wildly out of proportion to the offense.
I wonder how long it will be before a company attempts to make a DoS case against someone for visiting a site once. I could see the prosecutor in the Aaron Swartz case trying this. He was conducting a denial of service attack simply by visiting the download site for those academic journal articles. It just wasn't a very good DoS attack.
How do you make that comparison? Just a few months ago JP Morgan was fined $14Billion by US and UK regulators for its involvement in various dealings leading up to the crash. So far, nearly $100Billion in fines has been handed out across the US and EU for suspect deals that contributed to the financial climate prior to the crash.
There's an old expression: Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.
Roughly meaning: If the punishment for a minor crime is going to ruin you, why stop at minor? Go for something serious. They can't make the punishment any worse.
I don't know why you were modded down. In my home town, as a prank arouns graduation, the seniors would dump liquid soap in a fountain so it would bubble all over the place. It was visible on the main drag. Another aspect was putting that art celulous over the lights illuminating it to match the school colors (blue and gold). It took about 50 graduates in order to do it without getting picked up by the cameras. One year, they put sensors in the foutain that went off when the soap changed the ph levels enough alerting the city to what was happening. Out of about 100 students that participated 6 where caught- 4 who hadn't even dumped the soap yet and they had to pay for the entiee security theator that ensued for a midemeanor act of mischief. The sad part is that this had happened for so long, everyone thought the city was in on it and we just needed to watch out for the caretaker who would be upset because he had to clean it later.
I learned then that you aren't 2% guilty. If you participate, you are 100% liable and that liability includes what they spent in response to your actions. This was back in the late 80s early 90s. Nothing new with this kid outside of what was vandalized.
A salient example of s/sheep/lamb/ is the drug war which has become ever more violent over time as penalties for getting caught become ever more draconian. If you're going to do a life (or close to it) sentence for getting caught, might as well just kill the person trying to catch you or witnessing what you are doing, and improve your chance of remaining free.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The actualy formula for deterrence (0 - expected utility) is: Deterrence = (Probability of getting caught) * (Severity of punishment) - (Benefit) * (1 - (Probability of getting caught)).
This doesn't actually work for three reasons:
Even ancient Rome, where conservatives demanded criminals be crucified and bleeding-heart liberals merely fed them to lions, never ran out of them.
Another way this is misleading is that the lifetime of debt slavery - what the $183,000 amounts to - is not considered the punishment. 2 years probation is the punishment; $183,000 is "damages". Thus what we have here is an example of a rather nasty loophole in the law, where the main part of a punishment is not subject to normal lawmaking process but is rather ordered by the judge on a case-by-case basis. This leads to exactly this kind of perversions.
Compare: if my dog took a dumb in your lawn, would I be quilty and should I clean it up? Absolutely. If you then spent $183,000 to dog-proof your yard, should I pay for it? Of course not, that's crazy. Except that's exactly what happend here.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.