AT&T Hacker 'weev' Demands One Bitcoin For Each Hour He Spent In Jail

Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "The notorious troll and hacker known as Andrew 'weev' Auernheimer spent 13 months in jail for exposing an AT&T security flaw. He was recently released when a federal court overturned the conviction on grounds of improper venue. Now, Auernheimer has penned an open letter to the Department of Justice in which he demands reparations for acts of 'fraud' and 'violence' carried out against him over the past three years. Those reparations must be paid in Bitcoin, he says — 28,296, to be exact. At current market value, that comes out to $13.7 million. The bombastic letter is titled 'Open letter to federal scum,' and was allegedly bcc'd to 'a few hundred journalists.' In it, 28-year-old Auernheimer writes that he calculated the sum owed to him based on his market value:" A gem: "Know that all this wealth will be directed towards a good and charitable cause. I am building a series of memorial groves for the greatest patriots of our generation: Timothy McVeigh, Andrew Stack, and Marvin Heemeyer. You see, In the 'Special Housing Unit,' which is Bureau of Prisons codespeak for 'solitary confinement' and 'torture,' I had enough time to think about the current state of federal government. "

Comments

A fifth horseman

[Qzukk]

Now we can watch our rights be taken away in order to punish assholes, on top of drug users, pedos, terrorists, and hackers.

Remember folks, what the government does to weev, it can do to everyone else.

Re:A fifth horseman

[Anonymous Coward]

No shit? You mean the same country's government who passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, put the Japanese into concentration camps, got people fired and blacklisted for their political beliefs, etc. is more than willingly to abuse its powers? Say it aint so!!!

Re:A fifth horseman

[Anonymous Coward]

His "troops" that is, people who think the likes of McVeigh, Stack, and Heemeyer as heroes probably doesn't need any more reason to rally. Most normal law-abiding citizens aren't going to rally behind the banner of McVeigh. He should have played the game and named a couple random founding fathers. Now he's allied himself with only those who find murdering innocent people a valid way to change the federal government (worked well didn't it?). I don't see him gaining much support.

And why does he include Heemeyer in when speaking of federal government? Heemeyer's problem was with the local town council not the feds. He agreed to sell his property to a cement manufacturer for $250K then reneged and demanded $375K then a million. Obviously, the cement folks said fuck you and petitioned the town council to rezone an adjacent piece of land for their plant. The whole reason for Heemeyer's rampage was his own stupidity and greed. We're supposed to rally around that guy? You really want the law to allow you to go on a rampage if you, by your own greed, refuse a deal then get cut out of the final deal?

Re:A fifth horseman

[ShanghaiBill]

The government has created a martyr.

No, they have created a kook. Anyone that considers mass murders to be "patriots", and thinks that the likes of McVeigh, Stack and Heemeyer are admirable, has lost all credibility. Rather than making the government more accountable, people like this give everyone that opposes authoritarianism a bad name.

Re:A fifth horseman

[bhcompy]

Honestly, it just sounds like he's picking at random, like in Die Hard.

Karl: "Asian Dawn?"
Hans: "I read about them in Time Magazine"

Re:A fifth horseman

[spire3661]

Larry Flynt was an asshole i can respect, but not weev.

Re:A fifth horseman

[gstoddart]

really??? drug users are in the same class as terrorists and pedophiles?

How many billions have been spent on the war on drugs?

Clearly someone thinks so. And has for a very long time.

Re:A fifth horseman

[slack_justyb]

Yeap, this guy had a golden chance to make a cause and blew it by standing by people who kill other innocent people. Having a cause is one part knowing what to do and three parts getting the general public to like your cause. Using people who kill that general public tends to make them not like you all that much.

Re:A fifth horseman

[Penguinisto]

Agreed.

Now if he named folks like Snowden, Manning, and similar (where folks could actually go "yeah - they uncovered government badness and were whistleblowers", he could have gotten at least some support.

I mean, c'mon: he could have even stopped short and not even named anybody. At first I figured okay, he probably got a bad shake and deserves the compensation for his maltreatment. But nooo... he goes on to let his freak flag fly, and name those dumbasses as his heroes. My thoughts immediately became: "fuck that."

Mind you, the government is still way the hell in the wrong for locking him up if all he did was uncover a security flaw (and didn't sell or exploit it for personal gain), but holy shit...

Re:A fifth horseman

[NoKaOi]

You see, In the 'Special Housing Unit,' which is Bureau of Prisons codespeak for 'solitary confinement' and 'torture,' I had enough time to think about the current state of federal government. "

The guy is clearly messed up in the head from his experience (or maybe he was to some degree before, I don't know). They successfully broke him. Most likely with all that time in solitary confinement, in his mind he rallied behind the names of people who are famous for hating the government, regardless of their cause. I wonder if he can find a good psychotherapist willing to accept bitcoins.

Clearly they've broken him and...

[Assmasher]

..he's now Weev 2.0 - now with added 'crazy'!

Re:Clearly they've broken him and...

[rahvin112]

Prison does that. Americans are so interested in retribution and punishment that they forget what can happen to someone you treat like an animal, particularly given that said person will be released some day. The ironic part is that death row inmates are treated far better.

Re:Clearly they've broken him and...

[Curunir_wolf]

We need to stop letting sociopaths run our prisons. We should be giving all candidates psychological tests to make sure they're all compassionate people interested in keeping their prisoners safe and rehabilitating them so they can turn their lives around. Of course if you push for this, there are a ton of right-wing lunatics that will embarrass themselves by calling you "a bleeding-heart liberal." It's hard to reform society when many terrible people vote.

Not gonna help. We know now from sociological experiments that the environment turns nearly all the guards into sociopaths. It's a structural problem, not a people problem.

But the most pressing issue with our prison industrial complex is the sheer volume of citizens that are subjected to it. The US has the largest prison population by far in the entire world, both by numbers and proportion of the population. And that is directly attributable to the police-state infrastructure created and perpetuated by the Federal government, just like Weev has stated.

Timothy McVeigh

[berj]

Wow.. good role model there.. Timothy McVeigh. I repeat.. Wow.

Re:Timothy McVeigh

[PvtVoid]

Marvin Heemeyer is the man though..

"Outraged over the outcome of a zoning dispute, he armored a Komatsu D355A bulldozer with layers of steel and concrete and used it on June 4, 2004, to demolish the town hall, the former mayor's house, and other buildings in Granby, Colorado. The rampage ended when the bulldozer got stuck in the basement of a Gambles store he had previously destroyed. Heemeyer then killed himself with a handgun." (See here.)

Truly a 'Merkin hero.

Re:Timothy McVeigh

[Sperbels]

I just got trolled, didn't I?

Intelligence eclipsed by hate

[Stumbles]

Really? Those three deserve hommage by Stuckey? Stack intentionally flies his plane into a building kill several. Heemeyer has fun with a bulldozer. And worst of all in some respects, McVeigh detonates a bomb killing a hundred plus people. If those are the types you admire as worthy of a memorial then you have one warped sense of admiration. None of those even come close to fitting the description of a patriot.

Um... McVeigh a hero? You lost me pal

[Morpeth]

I absolutely detest the state of things right now, the NSA/Snowden revelations, corporations/lobbyists running the gov't, rights being ignored, etc. BUT that said, TImothy McVeigh was a murderer... including 18 children:

Peachlyn Bradley, 3, Oklahoma City
Gabreon D.L. Bruce, 3 months, Oklahoma City
Ashley Megan Eckles, 4, Guthrie
Baylee Almon, 1, Oklahoma City
Danielle Nicole Bell, 15 months, Oklahoma City
Zachary Taylor Chavez, 3, Oklahoma City
Anthony Christopher Cooper II, 2, Moore
Antonio Ansara Cooper Jr., 6 months, Midwest City
Aaron M. Coverdale, 5 1/2, Oklahoma City
Elijah S. Coverdale, 2 1/2, Oklahoma City
Jaci Rae Coyne, 14 months, Moore
Taylor Santoi Eaves, 8 months, Midwest City
Tevin D'Aundrae Garrett, 16 months, Midwest City
Kevin "Lee" Gottshall II, 6 months, Norman
Blake Ryan Kennedy, 1 1/2, Amber
Dominique Ravae (Johnson)-London, 2, Oklahoma City
Chase Dalton Smith, 3, Oklahoma City
Colton Wade Smith, 2, Oklahoma City

Many people are angry and frustrated, but please read those names and ages and tell me again about his 'heroism'?

Re:Um... McVeigh a hero? You lost me pal

[spire3661]

Dont use 'children' to prop up your argument. The adults lives in the building were just as valuable. Using 'children' language is News-Speak.

Re:Um... McVeigh a hero? You lost me pal

[Morpeth]

I didn't say the adults lives weren't valuable, so don't put words into my mouth. There is NO way an infant or toddler could make ANY choice or cause ANY action that could in any way be a threat to McVeigh. Hence my pointing them out. It's not a prop or news-speak, sorry you're so cynical.

While I don't in any sense condone ANYTHING he did, he could try to argue adults can make choices or actions that in some whacky way he could attempt to rationalize as a threat -- my point of bringing up the kids, is that they had ZERO, absolutely ZERO to do with whatever beef he had in his twisted mind.

Im no psychologist

[nimbius]

But Mister Weev seems a touch frustrated by the machinations of the american legal system as they pertain to billion dollar monopolies. The US Government has granted retroactive immunity to AT&T for a cornucopia of offenses with such timeliness as to be indistinguishable from an NTP stratum. Given the historical context in which AT&T has consistently operated, it would be no surprise if the government not only categorically refused payment, but retroactively enacted legislation ensuring Weev was guilty.

Weev always was a piece of shit

[Sycraft-fu]

Just because his conviction wasn't proper, doesn't mean he's not an asshat, or even that he didn't break the law. Note that his conviction was overturned because of the venue (meaning it was tried in the wrong court) not because of a problem with the charge or evidence. Now that's a good thing, the state needs to do everything properly in a trial, and if they fail to do so, the defendant gets to walk. That is a cornerstone of the American justice system.

This is just him showing more asshattery, and a pretty good indication that his time free is likely to be only temporary. Anyone with that level of delusion and self grandeur is likely to do something illegal again, and sooner rather than later, and the state will probably make sure to do everything right the second time around.

Like a friend of mine used to work in the PD's office. He got a client who had been arrested for tagging (graffiti) since a cop stopped him and found sharpie markers in his pockets. The kid had sure as shit been tagging and had used said markers to do it, but the cop hadn't seen that, and had no reason to search him, so my friend got it tossed out. So what happened? Same kid went and tagged again, but this time the cops watched him do it and caught him in the act. The kid was miffed my friend couldn't do anything the second time.

As Oscar Willde said to George Bernard Shaw

[Hognoxious]

Yeah? Well you're a fucking idiot who knows nothing about everything.

Re:As Oscar Willde said to George Bernard Shaw

[Hognoxious]

That, sir, is a slanderous insult.

I can spell it perfectly well, I just can't fucking type for shit.