Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
No, someone didn't just get prosecuted just because he sent a tweet to a special needs person. He sent a tweet with the intent to cause him to have a seizure, a tweet that embedded the image, and Twitter being a platform where tweets "just appear" when you go to your Twitter page.