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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.
Murderers can be paroled after 7 years, so 10 years in prison for a computer crime seems harsh.
They could put an ankle monitor on him, and he can spend 10 years cleaning bedpans in the hospitals he DDoSed. He would be contributing to society instead of a drain on the system.
Prisons should only be for people that are physically dangerous. For everyone else, there are more constructive punishments.
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.
Its kinda amazing that we got so many comments without anybody bringing up the case that kicked this all off. Its an extremely emotional case that was played up in the media for sure. But the thing that always troubled me about that case is that the hospital initiated a legal action to take Justina without doing any medical due diligence. Apparently, this is a problem for folks that have the kind of mitochondrial condition that she had.
I think the hospital was worried about was a Munchausen by proxy situation. But, the parents had verifiable genetic proof that Justina had a specific medical condition and the hospital could have verified this with a single phone call. We know they didn't bother to verify this until after they had already completed legal action to take Justina due to the testimony of the geneticist (who was at the same university as the child abuse expert they called instead).
Nobody is claiming that the parents are religious nuts. They looked emotional distraught during the media coverage but wouldn't you be if the government had just effectively kidnapped your child and was refusing to give necessary medical care to her? Seriously, most parents would feel like burning down buildings in that situation.
I want to hear some sort of cogent hypothesis for WTF the hospital was thinking when they initiated (and completed) a legal action to take a child without doing even the most cursory due diligence to ensure a mistake wasn't taking place. Somehow, that sort of lack of judgement should be criminal and most folks would probably be OK with those who are convicted of such a crime being put to death. Given all of this, its disingenuous to act as if the hospital didn't make a huge mistake and is probably covering up their actions. That being said, DOS'ing the hospital is hardly the right response given the high chance you will kill innocent sick kids in the process. So fuck this guy but don't let the hospital off the hook for their huge mistake either.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
I would say attacking the systems used to care for critically ill children is physically dangerous.
That is not what "physically dangerous" means. Would he physically assault anyone while cleaning bedpans? There is no evidence to suspect that. Can he run a DDoS attack while cleaning bedpans? Unlikely.
If access to the Internet is a really big concern, then he could be sentenced to repairing hiking trails in remote forests. For non-violent people, there is always a better alternative than prisons. Every other country in the world imprisons fewer people than America, and most have lower recidivism rates.
America's prison system is expensive, dysfunctional, and counterproductive. We need to end the knee jerk response of dealing with every problem by locking up more people. When a politician brags that he is endorsed by the police and prison unions, you should vote for the other guy.