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.

Comments

The Justina Pelletier angle seems to be

[rsilvergun]

one the right wing press ran with heavily. It's not an uncommon thing and I can't tell if there's anything to the stories. Too often when you've got a kid not getting treatment it's because of religious parents who want to take them home and pray until they die. There's a sizeable portion of folks on the right wing that support allowing this. Some of them are insane but well meaning but there's quite a few who are just using it as one more distraction and one more thing to get the rubes worked up about.

It's frustrating because that kind of propaganda can take already unstable people who aren't getting the treatment they need and push them over the edge. You get it a lot with abortion and there's lots of abortion doctors who routinely fear for their lives, especially down south.

That said, like I said I can't tell if the Pelletier case is another example of that or if it's a real case of a hospital overreaching it's mandate. I'm inclined to think the former though as the few cases I've read about where the parents said "We just want to take our child to another doctor" it later came out they were lying.