FBI Arrests Alleged Attacker Who Tweeted Seizure-Inducing Strobe at a Writer (theverge.com)

From a report on The Verge: An arrest has been made three months after someone tweeted a seizure-inducing strobe at writer and Vanity Fair contributing editor Kurt Eichenwald. The Dallas FBI confirmed the arrest to The Verge today, and noted that a press release with more details is coming. Eichenwald, who has epilepsy, tweeted details of the arrest and said that more than 40 other people also sent him strobes after he publicized the first attack. Their information is now with the FBI, he says. It isn't clear whether these "different charges" relate to similar online harassment incidents or something else entirely.

Comments

No.

[mcmonkey]

No one was arrested because they sent a picture someone didn't like.

If the facts as reported are true, there was real intent and possibility of injury.

Re:No.

[ausekilis]

No, but people are arrested or censored for saying things someone doesn't like. Just look up George Carlin's 7 words you can't say on television.

In this case, it was a picture sent (most likely) with the intent to injure or induce a seizure. There's a difference between offensive and injurious intent.

Re:No.

[sycodon]

I bet it won't be long before someone claims text in an email they received triggered some reaction

Re:No.

[Rick Schumann]

There's a difference between offensive and injurious intent.

Here's the problem with that, though: Who gets to decide what the difference really is? Consider this scenario:

Someone sets up someone else for an ostensibly harmless practical joke.
The joke happens, but the target is injured in the process, has to go to the ER. Charges are filed, a civil suit for damages is filed.

That's a rather extreme example, but well within the realm of possibility; the perpetrator of the joke can claim there was no intent to cause harm, but may be lying about that, but it doesn't matter. Harm was caused as a direct result, and he may well be criminally and civilly libel. Now, substitute sending someone something over the internet. Does it matter if there was intent to cause harm or not?

The problem is setting a legal precedent. If there is legal precedent that just sending someone a picture of something that causes harm of some sort over the Internet can be considered assault, then it potentially opens a Pandoras Box of legal troubles. What if someone is trolling Vegans or animal rights activists by sending gory pictures or videos of animals being slaughtered, and they claim they were caused harm by that? If there's legal precedent to back that claim up, then it's not an outrageous idea that sending anything to anyone over the Internet can be dangerous. Pretty much anyone could be arrested for sending anyone anything, if they can claim they where 'harmed' by it. Do we really want to live in that sort of world? Certainly, the standard (at least in a civil lawsuit) of what's considered reasonable would still stand, but our legal system could be clogged up by letigious people claiming they were injured by a picture.

Re:No.

[Rick Schumann]

Yeah sure. Let's set the stage for even more frivolous lawsuits, and more law enforcement man-hours wasted.

Fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget that this guy was targeted by alt-reichers and white supremacists because he was investigating some of Donald Trump's criminal activity.

Send this criminal to jail. The tweet was sent with the intent of triggering a seizure - that's worthy of a couple of years in the slammer, at least.

Re:AFK != IRL

[misexistentialist]

Except all the financial fraud done over the internet which is barely investigated. Organized crime is boring, but if a trivial incident makes the news then a prosecutor hits pause on his porn player and files charges.

Re:AFK != IRL

[borcharc]

I really hope this one goes to trial and then some interesting appeals. It's not clear what statute they claim was violated here but I am not buying the argument that a criminal act was committed.

Re:P-300 Waves

[Fire_Wraith]

It's about deliberate and demonstrable intent. Furthermore, it's about intent that can be proven in a court of law. In this case, the guy not only sent the image to someone known publicly to suffer seizures of this kind, he explicitly stated it was his intent to give the guy a seizure, and thereby do harm to him.

If I post up a flashing image on the FlashingObnoxiousGifs site, that's like my eating a peanut butter sandwich, or shooting my rifle at a firing range. It's not going to hurt anyone, unless they're being really really dumb.

If on the other hand, I deliberately try to serve cookies containing peanuts to you, knowing you're deathly allergic to peanuts, and tell someone that my intention is to do you harm, then yes, that's illegal and I should expect to be charged, much the same as if I'd laced them with a more generally toxic compound.
Likewise, if I turn around on the range and point the rifle at you, and pull the trigger, yelling 'eat lead motherf*cker', then uh, yeah, I'm kinda deliberately trying to harm you.

Harrison Bergeron

[Okian Warrior]

"At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net employees."

I think you've got the wrong novel.

In Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron", everyone was required to be "equal" in all ways. People who were smarter than average were required to wear headphones with distracting noises, people who were stronger or faster than average were required to wear extra weights or confining clothing, and so on.

We've just had a case where a couple of deaf people got 20,000 videos taken offline because the videos were not closed captioned for the deaf.

Now we've got a legal precedent which means that no one will be able to send a specially crafted image because it hurt a special-needs person.

Once this legal precedent is extended, can it be extended to other areas of harm? Would the same legal theory apply if:

1) The text content triggers someone into vividly reliving a past assault or rape?
2) The video of a war encounter triggers someone's PTSD?
3) The sudden audio content startles someone into spilling acetone or MEC or coffee in their lap?
4) Some religious person finds the imagery insulting to their religion?

I'm not against people with special needs, but this thing about "everyone must abide by the lowest denominator" is utter crap.

I once knew an epileptic who would get seizures by looking at a checkerboard floor pattern. I was throwing a party, had built some games in the basement, and she asked before coming what type of flooring was used in the games.

Must we to ban checkerboard patterns on the entire internet because of this one person?

Kurt Eichenwald is obviously a person with special needs, and that's fine, but he should deal with his special needs at his end, rather than forcing everyone to conform to his needs. His computer should be set to not flash animated gifs, to require a keypress to go to the next frame. He needs installed software that overlays a neutral diffuse background on online web pages and images.

The deaf people who wanted access to the online courses should also deal with their special needs at their end, by arranging to get captioning(*) for the courses they actually want to take, instead of making the university take down 20,000 course videos.

If this lawsuit has any merit, we're bound to see a serious erosion of the immense value we've built up in this internet thing.

Eventually we'll all be in the "Harrison Bergerac" world.

(*) And how they do that, by government assistance for the handicapped, or automated captioning, or perhaps by requiring the university do it in specific instances on request, is a separate issue. The point is that the changes happen at the special-needs endpoint, and not the entire rest of the internet.