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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..."
no one trusts the "justice" system anymore. One minute of using an automated tool is apparently a worse offense than crashing the economy.
1 minute or 15, you were there, your guilty. Plain and simple. so for me thats not the worst part. It seems to be a fair part if you ask me
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.
Knowingly trying to bring down web sites is a crime. Should we also not arrest people if they only throw one brick through a store window but do not take anything? Should we also not arrest people who kick someone only once when lying on the ground?
A crime is a crime, and the act of committing a crime takes only the moment you decide you are going to commit it. The duration of the actual crime hardly matters when compared to intent.
Also, consider the fact that the minute is only the point they could prove what he did, if he was willing to aid in DDOS attacks who knows how many other people he helped attack in the past?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and the MPAA issues a successful DMCA takedown (automated) for something they do not own the rights to....nothing happens.
But your honor, I only pulled the trigger for 1 second, 2 tops! While the fine seems FREAKING large I can appreciate that it was tied directly too a purpose. i.e. the amount paid to hire someone to secure the site. But I feel attaching it to the actual value lost (5k) would have been more fair, maybe with a bit extra to be punitive? I imagine that if they caught more people the fine would have been spread out among them? But I don't understand why intent to do harm would in any way be lessened because "I only did the bad thing for a short period of time."
These people need to learn what actual violence against them and their property is
Then you get to learn what ACTUAL violence is, either buy police officer or prison inmate.
Let me know when you want off the not-so-merry-go-round.
If your entire life is going to be ruined for any sort of protest, the natural incentive is to go...
Except that property damage is not protest.
Actions that will ruin my entire life do not "incent" me to act worse, they in fact very much incent me not to ruin my life. It is possible to protest without damaging anyone or anything, a fact that seems lost on many groups these days.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First of all, you'll note I am mainly referring to the comment that the 'worst part" is that he only participated for a minute. You seem to be arguing the worst part is the fine.
I partly agree, however I would also say that computers allow us to magnify actions beyond what we can do physically - just as we can send a message to millions via computer, we can also easily do millions of dollars in damage via computer to. I can't say what the right fine would be but it's probably not proportional to what someone would think one persons fine should be...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem with your analogy is that in the case of murder, if a second person gets caught, he'll face murder charges too. There is no restitution - it's punitive.
But in this case, where the only person who got caught was faced with the entire charge, a second person who gets caught won't have to pay anything because it's already paid. It destroys equality in front of the law.
Either that, or you make the second person pay the same amount, and then you have a victim or court system that profits from him being caught. Which both are even worse alternatives.
The damage he should pay is what damage he caused. Nothing more, nothing less.
This is ridiculous. He didn't rape anyone. He didn't hurt anyone. He rapidly requested web pages for 1 minute, slightly contributing to a computer bogging down. In a less batshit-crazy, less rabidly corporatist world, this would carry a punishment on par with dropping a cigarette butt on the street.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm American, so I speak from experience. The US legal system allows punitive damages. Eric Rosol didn't have to actually go to jail - that was the fair part of the sentence. But US verdicts with insane monetary awards are not unusual. There's the infamous "McDonald's coffee" case which eventually got settled out of court for a never disclosed amount after a jury awarded what almost everybody in the US considered an unreasonable and probably insane amount of money in punitive damages. Jammie Thomas, the last person you'd ever want to fight the RIAA, has gotten a series of shocking judgements against her, far in excess of any real damage that was done by her. I served on a jury once that awarded punitive damages and they're meant to send a lesson to the guilty party and others (this part is key) that there are very real financial costs to certain actions. In this case, the message is clear that people should not do DOS activities or they too may be facing ruinous financial penalties. I haven't followed this case at all, so for all I know like Jammie Thomas, Rosol may be his own worst enemy and perhaps his demeanor in court led to this outcome. Juries really don't like arrogant defendants who insist that they did nothing wrong when the jury feels otherwise. I can tell you from experience that the vast majority of jurors are non-techies and some are actually tech hostile. These kinds of people also get easily swayed by prosecutor arguments that some great evil just happened that must be prevented in the future because they don't really understand what happened. Juries also sometimes get this subgroup of people (roughly 10% of the population by my estimation) who see the entire world in black and white and are obsessed with punishing rule breakers as they see them. These are the people who want draconian punishments for trivial offenses (ie. they'd support the death penalty for people who let a parking meter expire as "That will teach them not do that again!"). Sometimes on juries they are adamant that the "evil doer" has to get a very harsh sentence and if the other jurors really don't care, want to go home, and agree at least that the defendant really is guilty, the other jurors will just agree to large punitive damages so they can get on with their lives. It's difficult to get punitive damages reduced and there's no incentive in the US system for juries to really find a fair verdict. The system just wants them to all agree on the verdict and if 11 people give in to 1 stubborn crazy person, the US system accepts this as the cost for how the system works. The prevailing dogma that gets drilled into all law students and the American public in general is that the US jury system is the greatest of all possible systems and is the cornerstone of our democracy, so nobody on the legal side dares to question whether it really works as it is supposed to or not.
Well, there's one DDOS attack that's perfectly legal. Boycott Koch Industries and all their products. Of course it'd take some hunting to find out just what Koch does besides drill for oil, foul the environment and inject tons of money to corrupt the political system to their ends.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...