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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.
"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 bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Turns out the internet is as much real life as, well, real life. If it's possible to physically injure someone over the internet, then it's just as illegal to attempt to do so as it is in real life.
"it's just a joke", "for the lolz" or "mah freeze peach" does not make punching someone in the face legal no matter if you think it's funny or are trying to raise a political point.
And being on the internet is certainly not a free pass to do illegal things.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
If something like this is done with intent to harm and knowledge of the likelihood of harm, it's tantamount to punching him in the face.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
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.
If the government wants to make an example of you, it doesn't really matter what you did or what the law says.
This is true the world over, even in a "free" country.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I wonder if the reason the FBI took this meme sent on Twitter so seriously has something to do with the alleged "brainwashing" neuroscience techniques pioneered by Delgado and others.
Flashing memes get sent by the millions over the internet daily, some sent with the intent of causing seizure. Why take this one so seriously?
There seems to be a very limited number of answers, so it makes me wonder. This just seems so non-sensical and asymetric...punishment does not fit the crime whatsoever.
Thank you Dave Raggett
You better just be reasonable and understanding instead of a hairtrigger freakout, thats how we get these god damned wars started
There is no reasonable when dealing with alt-white neo-Nazis.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There are laws against deliberately causing people physical harm, no matter what the means used.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Attempting to injure someone is illegal, yes.
The law doesn't try to carefully enumerate every method by which you might injure someone so that a clever criminal can say "haha! I invented a new weapon, so now it is legal for me to injure people with it because it isn't on the list of weapons that existed decades ago when the law was written!"
The law says attempting to hurt someone with a weapon that might be lethal is "assault with a deadly weapon", so if the prosecutor can show that you intended to hurt someone, and you used something that might cause death, you can be convicted. The law does not attempt to enumerate every weapon that could possibly be used to hurt or kill someone; the prosecutor can present evidence that you knew the thing you used was dangerous and could cause death.
If you send a strobe gif to your programming partner with a note saying "hey, look what I created with my leet javascript skills!", you probably couldn't be convicted because the prosecutor couldn't show intent. But if you are bragging in writing about how you are going to cause someone to have a seizure by sending them a strobe gif, then it probably isn't hard to convince a jury that you intended to cause inujury, and it shouldn't be hard to find an expert witness to testify that it is quite possble to die from an epileptic seizure.
As for how it can be prosecuted, well, same way as anything else. Lawyers show up in court and show evidence, and attempt to convince a jury that you violated a law. The specifics vary by law, but generally "did you do X" combined with "did you have intent to violate the law when you did X".
Speaking as a leftist who has a personal hatred of Nazis (on top of all the general hatred), I think we need to wait until they violate criminal law before they're brought to justice. I do believe in these formalities.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
sonofabitch, Geocities is still up
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's actually very, very different. A powerful green laser shined into someone's eyes will cause harm to exactly 100% of the people or animals on earth ..... a strobe gif might cause a seizure in .0001% of the population and wouldn't even effect the majority of controlled epileptics.
"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.
Peanut allergy is real. So, apparently, is the effect of strobing images on epileptics. But it is still worrying...
Recall, that "trigger warnings" are already "a thing". What if my political opinion "triggers" somebody — causing them pain and/or other suffering? For now, such snowflakes are content to escape the brutal realities of life in "safe spaces". Unfortunately, those prolifereate and are already used to silence certain opinions.
True, FBI is not yet used to go after the "triggering" folks, but that can't be far off. When the current crop of students enters real life and their careers place (some of) them into actual decision-making positions, Law Enforcement will equate such triggering with assault — and doctors, currently in pre-med at those same campuses, will certify in court that the "victims'" "pain" is real...
Oh, and did you know, movement is seriously afoot to make "hate speech" a crime too?
Yep. Right here... I do consider certain Illiberals to be beyond repair and do wish to make them uncomfortable — my very /. signatures are designed to mock something they hold dear. Intentionally.
Whatever this intent says about my own character flaws, it is still protected by the First Amendment today. But we are already sliding down the slippery slope... The First Amendment may be protecting a nebulous "right" to sell pornography (except for the child sort, for some reason), as well as to (quietly!) video-tape police. But, if the current trends aren't reversed, it will — in a generation — become illegal to say certain things because of the "painful reaction" such speech might cause...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Well, that tweet was sent with a note of "you deserve a seizure" alongside it, which pretty much confirms intent to harm
Sometimes it can be hard to confirm intent. This time, it was pretty obvious the sender intentionally sent that eeizure-inducing image hoping it would cause a seizure.
No mind reading tricks needed here - the sender made it plainly obvious they were intentionally sending it to harm the guy. Maybe in other cases, but not this one.
Because the jerks/trolls who'd do stuff like this will become more sophisticated. Instead of attaching a GIF, they'll use an embedded link which auto-loads the image from a server. And the server will only send the "bad" image the first time, substituting an innocuous image for subsequent viewings.
Here's to hoping this leads to all email clients gaining an option to block automatic loading of animated GIFs and/or embedded image links.
The twitter account also had DMs where he'd bragged about how he hoped he'd die, and there was a Wikipedia page with an edit showing the victim's death the next day.
It's stupidly obvious he was hoping he'd kill the guy.
It should be straightforward to write a filter to detect animated images with luminance variations of the right amplitude and frequency to cause seizures in susceptible individuals. These individuals could then enable the filter and be spared from this type of attack.
I wonder why the various browser and email application vendors have not implemented such, for ADA purposes.
A strobe gif in an email is illegal, really? How are you going to prosecute that?
Well, you have the police investigate, they find evidence that you sent this email, then they find evidence that you sent it with the intent of hurting someone, then you get sent, to court, then you get convicted, then you go to jail. That's how this gets prosecuted.
You can embed pictures in tweets now.
We're treading dangerously into territory where you're trying to read minds.
No, we'really not. It's so old it even has a name in latin.
mens rea
a.k.a. "a guilty mind". It's only been the cornerstone of the justice system since about 1215, maybe earlier.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Pictures don't strobe either. I'm guessing you can post animations. I don't care enough to log into the twitter account I created a couple years ago, and have yet to use, to try it.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Intent or not, it should not be a crime to send such a graphic. Shouldn't matter if the recipient is an epileptic. It's just a graphic. There was no physical assault.
Maybe we should litter the internet with such images to keep the images considered part of everyday life. Just like my kid should be able to take peanut butter sandwiches to school.
For those with such issues... If it hurts if you touch it, then don't touch it. If the internet can harm you, don't use it. If peanut butter can kill you, stay out of places that will have it. Don't see me rushing to be a bee keeper with my bee allergy.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Disappointed? Why? Either way I win, as Okian Warrior validates the disdain by failing to correct their error, or they do what I wanted and improve their own conduct.
I don't play to lose.
You always win.
You know that, right?
Right. That's not going to be hard. He's being charged with cyberstalking, but just for factual reference, this is from the DOJ:
"Evidence received pursuant to a search warrant showed Rivello’s Twitter account contained direct messages from Rivello’s account to other Twitter users concerning the victim. Among those direct messages included statements by Rivello, including “I hope this sends him into a seizure,” “Spammed this at [victim] let’s see if he dies,” and “I know he has epilepsy.” Additional evidence received pursuant to a search warrant showed Rivello’s iCloud account contained a screenshot of a Wikipedia page for the victim, which had been altered to show a fake obituary with the date of death listed as Dec. 16, 2016. Rivello’s iCloud account also contained screen shots from epilepsy.com with a list of commonly reported epilepsy seizure triggers and from dallasobserver.com discussing the victim’s report to the Dallas Police Department and his attempt to identify the Twitter user."
So yeah. When you've got someone stating "I hope this gives him a seizure," "Let's see if he dies," altering his Wikipedia page to show a death date and obit, and looking up information on the kinds of seizures that cause death, you haven't exactly established a strong defense for how this should be treated anything less than extremely seriously. This isn't a prank. It was a deliberate attempt to injure or kill someone.
Do you know how many epileptics die as a result of seizures every year in the US alone? Roughly 50,000. Provoking a seizure in an epileptic is not a fucking joke.
You can post animations, but they don't automatically play unless you have it enabled. It's the same for videos if you embed them.
Om, nomnomnom...
...I can honestly say I'm no longer surprised by stupid shit like this. All those YouTubers with "RIP headphone users" videos better watch out, because if some people don't know how to turn their fucking brightness down so their computer/phone doesn't give them a seizure, claims of hearing damage from excessive volume can't be far off.
I have no love whatsoever for Twitter trolls (and the thought of one being arrested by the FBI almost seems like karma), but the FBI should've told this fuckwit to turn his image autoloading off. It's kinda up there with "don't run random EXE files from porn sites", "don't click on links in spam", and "don't give your credit card/bank account info to Nigerian royalty."
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
A strobe gif in an email is illegal, really? How are you going to prosecute that?
Well it depends on the state. In most states you bring charges to a grand jury which examines the basis for the charge and issues and indictment, then Bob's your uncle. In some states you can file what's called an "information", which leads to a preliminary hearing. Either way, you have to show that you have some basis for prosecution, and then it's on to the jury trial.
In the jury trial, you have to convince ALL twelve jurors that the accused is guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. To do that you have to show two elements:
actus reus An actual act, omission, or possession which contravenes the law. mens rea "Guilty mind" -- intent to do the unlawful thing.What's confusing to people here is that the same actus reus can be criminal or innocent, depending on intent and awareness. If someone slips a piece of shoplifted property into your pocket, your possession is unlawful, but you aren't aware of it so you don't have mens rea. If you serve someone with a deadly nut allergy food that will kill him, whether that is attempted murder depends on whether or not you know he will be harmed.
So to answer your question, to prosecute sending a gif, you have to show that the person sending it was aware that it would cause harm at a minimum. If you can show he intended to cause harm that's even better. In this case, the offending gif was accompanied by this text:
Saying that seems amazingly stupid. But the delusion you can escape legal responsibility for assaulting someone by using means that wouldn't work on everyone is pretty stupid too.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There are types of media, which play automatically. Others do not.
I think the automatic ones are loops, the others are videos.
Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.