Slashdot Mirror
Aaron Swartz's Federal Judge Gives Anonymous Hacker 10 Years In Prison For DDoS Attacks On Children's Hospitals (zdnet.com)
Danngggg writes: Many will remember Martin Gottesfeld since he was arrested on a speedboat coming from Cuba. He volunteered at trial that he and his wife had just been denied political asylum by Castro. Gottesfeld has said he did it to defend the life of an innocent child named Justina Pelletier. On Thursday, the same judge that over saw the Aaron Swartz case sentenced the Anonymous hacktivist to 10 years in federal prison for a DDoS of Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard-affiliated hospitals, and Wayside Youth and Family. The sentence included $440,000 in restitution, 3 years supervised release, and other conditions. The week before, Gottesfeld docketed a 690-page affidavit (including exhibits) documenting the judge's conflicts of interest and why he doesn't belong anywhere near the case. That's available on the FreeMartyG website. Local news spoke to his wife after the sentencing hearing as well.
This guy was trying to DDoS hospitals. I can't think of any excuse that would actually excuse that, and "doing it to save some child's life" is flat out unbelievable. If it takes him 680 pages to document "conflicts of interest", I have to think there is a lot of smoke being blown to inflate that page count, and probably not much fire.
If it takes him 680 pages to document "conflicts of interest", I have to think there is a lot of smoke being blown to inflate that page count, and probably not much fire.
Basically, The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Reminds me of the (literally) hundreds of Tweets I've seen from some idiot saying something about "no collusion" ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
He brings in his kid because there's a specialist at the hospital that can help.
Others at the hospital look at his kid - refuse to send the kid the specialist. When he tries to get his kid back, they accuse him of child abuse and take his kid.
One of the point if you look around for more balanced article, is that the dr korson at the time had not done a muscle biopsy (one diagnosis which is deemed necessary - and reading what he told over the year about his method of "clumping" versus "scattering" diagnosis this brings up certain doubt about him). And certainly there was no mitochondrial genetic analyzes.
Couple of things: 1) I can tell you are not a parent, 2) most juries are composed mostly of parents
Maybe perhaps the hospital should have done one of those first before resorting to CPS? As for what you say, it seems to be true. Its also true they didn't know any of it when they called in CPS. They would have had to contact the geneticist first for them to know that. They only found this information out after CPS had taken the child. So its more papering over what they did rather than admitting what they did. The fact that they can do this now, and that they are willing to throw a fellow medical researcher under the bus to do it, should tell you what they are willing to do to get out of this one.
The dumbest thing the hospital has done so far (other than the original mistakes) was to not settle immediately. The hospital can quibble and go back and forth about mitochondrial issues and all its going to do is make the jury want to hang them more. Because the simple fact is, they didn't know any of it when they called CPS in the first place. And the fact that there is clearly medical uncertainty here, will count against them. People will quite reasonably have the attitude that "YOU(the hospital) SHOULD HAVE BEEN SURE BEFORE CALLING CPS". Anything that counts against that no matter how complex or smart or medically sound, will get them into even more trouble. Before you take people's kids, you have to be sure. Anything that seems to go against that simple premise will get harshly rebuffed by almost any jury. You want to see an outrageous legal settlement? Argue that you should be able to take people's kids without due processes or even reviewing all the information at hand.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
You DO know that a hospital's web pages and business admin don't run in the same space as the patient monitors, right?