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'Anonymous' Hacker Indicted As His Hunger Strike Continues (newsweek.com)

Eight months after being rescued at sea near Cuba and then arrested, Anonymous hacker Martin Gottesfeld now faces prosecution as well as death by hunger. Newsweek reports: A member of Anonymous has been indicted on hacking charges while on the third week of a prison hunger strike protesting perceived institutionalized torture and political prosecutions. Martin Gottesfeld, 32, was charged this week in relation to the hacking of Boston Children's Hospital in 2014 following the alleged mistreatment of one of its patients. Gottesfeld has previously admitted to targeting the hospital, though says he did it in defense of "an innocent, learning-disabled, 15-year-old girl"...

Since beginning his hunger strike on October 3, Gottesfeld tells Newsweek from prison he has lost 16.5 pounds. He says he will continue his hunger strike until two demands are met: a promise from the presidential candidates that children are not mistreated in the way he claims Pelletier was; and an end to the "political" style of prosecution waged by Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts.

The indictment claims that the hospital spent more than $300,000 to "mitigate" the damage from the 2014 attack.

25 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Hunger strike... how silly by fustakrakich · · Score: 1

    Anybody really think they will let him die? Please! There will be feeding tubes going into both ends..

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    1. Re:Hunger strike... how silly by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 3, Insightful

      IT writers, popular press and especially Holywood have been getting the definition of "hacker" wrong for over 25 years.

      It's a lost battle. The word "hacker" has pretty much been redefined to mean someone who breaks into computers. That's how language works.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    2. Re:Hunger strike... how silly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      The Cracker/Hacker battle was over more than 20 years ago, time get over yourself and move out of your parents basement.

    3. Re: Hunger strike... how silly by mbeckman · · Score: 3, Informative

      You are confused about how word defintions are canonized. Check the Oxford English Dictionary: words are defined by their current language and practical usage. This is why "cleave" today means "separate" when in the past it meant "join".

      Nostalgic tinkerers from yesteryear cling to the earliest, now extinct, definition of hacker, which was indeed innocuous. That definition dates from the 1950s, when consumers seldom used technical means for electronics or computing. Today's usage of "hackin", in an era when most consumers are much more technical than in the mid-20th, refers almost exclusively to illegal intrusive technical means.

    4. Re: Hunger strike... how silly by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Learn how to scroll down and you wouldn't fail so epically. It still means both.

      https://en.oxforddictionaries....

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    5. Re: Hunger strike... how silly by mbeckman · · Score: 1

      There is no need to scroll down, as both definitions fit on the same page. You probably just don't understand the difference between formal and informal definitions. OED clearly marks the older definition of "hacker" as informal, and hence secondary. It's like the difference between the formal definition of "Neanderthal" -- An extinct species of human that was widely distributed in ice-age Europe between c.120,000 and 35,000 years ago, with a receding forehead and prominent brow ridges" -- and the informal definition as someone who stubbornly lives in the past.

    6. Re:Hunger strike... how silly by crawling_chaos · · Score: 1

      Considering Russia's negative population growth, I find your assertion to be questionable at best.

      --
      You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
      -- Colonel Adolphus Busch
  2. Re:A member of Anonymous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Could there be a more infantile group wannabes?

    Yeah, the Trump campaign and his followers

  3. Carmen Ortiz by RonVNX · · Score: 4, Informative

    I was highly skeptical of the whole thing until I read the words "Carmen Ortiz". Now I am forced to look at this knowing a corrupt, unrepentant career criminal (Ortiz) is involved.

  4. Lesson by Kohath · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Save yourself from hunger and indictment by not being a jerk. Not being a jerk to people has many benefits.

    1. Re:Lesson by Sad+Loser · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I agree. IAAD but not in US and not involved in this case.

      When you practice medicine you are always surprised at what you find and you would not believe some of the things we see.
      Patients in wheelchairs who are physically and neurologically normal. Patients who present with strange and catastrophic conditions who then turn out to be known Munchausens.

      In the case of adults if someone chooses to do strange things we do not have any interest or right to stop them, providing they are not harming others.

      However in the case of children, if we believe that illness is not present, and therefore that the child is being harmed by the presumption of illness, then we have a duty of care to the child to prevent it. It is not negotiable - we have legal and moral duty to do this. An example of this is children whose parents poison (and sometimes kill) using salt. These situations are very rarely immediately obvious.

      This guy has taken on himself to judge this difficult and messy situation, and unless you are directly involved in the case and have some expertise to bring to the table, a lot of people would agree with you that this indeed makes it likely to be a jerk.

      --
      Humorous signatures are over-rated.
    2. Re:Lesson by sjames · · Score: 1

      It's a little more complicated. First, separating parent and child is an intrinsic harm in and of itself, so you need to be damned certain the parents are harming the child. In this case, the child was already under a physician's care. It's not as if the parents were giving her black market medical treatments. Neither group of doctors claimed that there was nothing wrong with her or that the parents were actively giving her something to make her sick, they just disagreed on the diagnosis.

      Essentially the parents were "abusive" because they believed the doctors at Tufts rather than the doctors at Boston Children's.

    3. Re:Lesson by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      I disagree. It doesn't make him a "jerk," it makes him a "person who deserves to be behind bars."

      I agree. He's probably not a jerk, he was just born predisposed to the reprehensible behavior that requires society to keep him caged.

      It is too bad that we can't just go full "Clockwork Orange" and try to brainwash these people and at least partially recover the situation.

  5. recap by harvey+the+nerd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't think Anonymous went about things the right way but they appear to be right about the problem with BCH. A BCH psychiatrist (usually the bottom of the med school barrel) invoked invasive legal provisions to kidnap a child with a medical condition diagnosed and treated by internal medicine doctors at another Boston hospital. The kid became a multiple cash stream and an injured experimental subject of BCH, as well as hostage. Both Mass and Conn became complicit in the kidnap.

    After a year, BCH essentially proved the other drs right by almost killing the kid. The parents and kid were damaged far more than $300,000. The kid's health then had to be restored as best as possible by the parents' previous drs... By a jury, the actual damages would be over a million.

    The real issues here involve the state "antiabuse" powers against competent and caring parents, corporate greed and persistent misbehavior (BCH), involuntary experimental subjects, medical corruption, and gunpoint medicine. BCH got off lightly, the favored historical response to kidnapping and torture is death.

    1. Re:recap by BlueStrat · · Score: 1

      I don't think Anonymous went about things the right way but they appear to be right about the problem with BCH. A BCH psychiatrist (usually the bottom of the med school barrel) invoked invasive legal provisions to kidnap a child with a medical condition diagnosed and treated by internal medicine doctors at another Boston hospital. The kid became a multiple cash stream and an injured experimental subject of BCH, as well as hostage. Both Mass and Conn became complicit in the kidnap.

      After a year, BCH essentially proved the other drs right by almost killing the kid. The parents and kid were damaged far more than $300,000. The kid's health then had to be restored as best as possible by the parents' previous drs... By a jury, the actual damages would be over a million.

      The real issues here involve the state "antiabuse" powers against competent and caring parents, corporate greed and persistent misbehavior (BCH), involuntary experimental subjects, medical corruption, and gunpoint medicine. BCH got off lightly, the favored historical response to kidnapping and torture is death.

      How dare you bring reason and context to an 'Anonymous-bashing' party!

      I agree, Anonymous should have come up with a better response, but from my assessment of the facts available, BCH knowingly acted criminally and negligently in the Pelletier case and likely in a number of others as well, and both MA and CT governments criminally colluded with BCH in abusing the child and wrongly abridging the parent's rights.

      Go read up on the Justine Pelletier case. It's any parents' worst nightmare. Authority out of control.

      When the powers that are supposed to protect innocent life turn to harming it, don't be surprised when groups of individuals come together to protect that life.

      Strat

      --
      Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
    2. Re:recap by HiThere · · Score: 1

      And note well that this "well organized militia" would need to be totally independent of government control or approval. But it's also worth noting that such things have a very bad track record historically, i.e. even worse than governments.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  6. Civil disobediance? by BlueCoder · · Score: 1

    That is what this sounds like to me. It kind of like a physical blockade to a room where people go to give donations. Only difference is that it's one individual verses many.

    Three weeks in a white collar jail seems like an appropriate punishment to me.

    As for what they did to the girl and her family: A children's hospital guilty of abuse... As for the Doctors involved.. if they didn't push their diagnosis then it's not on them but rather social services. The doctors would just be fallible idiots and need this misdiagnosis on their records for the rest of their life. But often enough there are laws that force Doctors to report, when they even in the slightest they suspect abuse. In that case it's social services that was abusive. There should always be at least 5 doctors involved from different hospitals in a case like this before you remove a child from a parents custody and control.

    I don't care what the social service liberals says. You have to prove abuse. And hard as it maybe to believe it can be more traumatic and abusive to remove a child from so called abuse. In such cases you supervise and collect hard evidence. Where are the punishments to the system when the system gets it wrong?

  7. So the hospital was correct? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I only have Wikipedia and news to go on, but it seems the hospital went to court to take her from her parents. They stopped the heart medicine she was on, stopped a lot of other medicines...... and they were correct. She was being medically abused by over anxious parents demanding medicines for problems that weren't real.

    A year later the same judge returned her to her parents and she was alive and well. WITHOUT ALL THAT MEDICINE THEY'D BEEN SHOVING INTO HER.

    So surely time showed the medical professionals in the children's hospital were correct.

    1. Re:So the hospital was correct? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      So surely time showed the medical professionals in the children's hospital were correct.

      That is the exact opposite conclusion compared to many other comments from the last time this was discussed.

    2. Re:So the hospital was correct? by Megol · · Score: 1

      Conclusion? You are only hearing the parents story AS THE HOSPITAL IS FORBIDDEN TO SPEAK!

      Now if there will be a trial then maybe (unless the judge want to/can make some information secret given it is about an underage child) we will hear the hospitals _and_ social services version. What we already know (as it isn't confidential) is that the parents made sure that their child got a worse situation than the state wanted (by threatening lawsuits etc. to people that did nothing wrong).

      The story stinks however where the stank comes from is unknown to the public. But this "hacker" is an asshole anyway and should grow up, shut up and stop behaving like an idiot.

    3. Re:So the hospital was correct? by harvey+the+nerd · · Score: 1

      There have been a lot of hearings. There have been a lot of people involved. BCH's story is not one of silenced innocence.

  8. Re:A member of Anonymous by gweihir · · Score: 1

    There is/was: LulzSec.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  9. Faces death by hunger? by silverkniveshotmail. · · Score: 1

    Is that really a fair way to portray it? I mean he's doing it to himself.

  10. Re:Kill him already by gweihir · · Score: 1

    Sounds like somebody is in urgent need of medical help for his deranged state...

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  11. Re:Misplaced effort by HiThere · · Score: 1

    We need to keep working toward a system where our Senators and Representatives actually know what We The People want and need.

    What makes you think that they don't? I'm rather certain that most of them know that most people don't want children used as experimental subjects without their parents permission. But the legislators have other priorities.

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.