Andrew Auernheimer, known online as "weev" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev), is nothing like Aaron Swartz. I speak from personal experience with weev.
Thanks to weev and his associates, my business partner, many of my volunteers, some family members of the above, and everybody who weev and his "trolls" could reach were subjected to a months-long campaign of constant harassement.
* One volunteer had to interview with Child Protective Services and the police because of false complaints made by weev and his friends.
* Another volunteer had trouble at her university because they tracked down her professors and made false claims.
* Our business faced several Denial of Service attacks and false complaints to our merchant processors and hosting providers.
In the end, it stopped when (I can only assume) he got bored. We developed a strong relationship with our hosting provider, our new payment processor, and we did as much as we could to help people who were put in bad situations because of weev's actions. Ultimately, we lost some volunteers and bled money for 3 months, but we survived.
So, weev has a good enough story to get his "confession" in TechCrunch and on Twitter and people think that he's another example of the over-broad reach of law and the destruction of young lives by powerful corporations/organizations.
Maybe it is.
But if you value the legacy of Aaron Swartz, do not for one minute confuse him and Andrew Auernheimer. One was a man driven by a vision who helped defeat SOPA and did many other good and noble things, the other is a self-described troll who spent years of his life doing his best to extract "lulz" from the pain and suffering of his fellow human beings.
Everything I've read about him with the partial exception of some of his writing makes him seem like an ass. Being an ass shouldn't be criminal but some of the things you list should be. Harassment and wasting police time are both offences in the UK although I've no idea about in the US (probably state dependent). DOS attacks may also be illegal and in my view are more serious than the action in this case.
All that doesn't make accessing a sequence of URLs, joking about selling the resulting personal data, giving it to a journalist to expose the flaw and then deleting the data worthy of a long prison sentence (if any at all). If this offence gets a large penalty what room is there for someone who does sell the data from such a break for profit? There is also the risk that it sets a norm for this offence and the next person being threatened by a prosecutor hears about how this guy got 10 years for just crawling a sequence of URLs.
My conclusion is that it is OK to hate this guy, think he deserves a long spell in prison but not to want this action to lead to a long sentence.
That analogy stinks and it is not as simple as you make it. It is about intent and malicious use. Opening a door is legal too, still you can get punished if you were not allowed to open that specific door and abused the opportunity to take some stuff with you or violate someone's privacy.
The problem is not that "he incremented a number, get the sheriff" but "he incremented a number to get access to information which he that maliciously used".
Except that he "maliciously used" the data by giving it to a journalist. Sounds like an act of a whistleblower to me. His intent was to expose (and embarass) AT&T and to me the fact that he didn't like AT&T and wanted to hurt them is irrelevant.
Had he actually tried to sell the personal data OR actually shorted AT&T shares that would be very different from my point of view and be worthy of actual punishment but my understanding is that didn't happen. Given it didn't happen it should be up the prosecution to prove that he wasn't joking for that to be used as intent.
I'm a little uneasy about the idea of not prosecuting him at all though as the flaw could have been exposed by collecting a sample of the data to see the extent of it without collecting it all but I would be equally open to prosecuting AT&T for not securing customer data appropriately (I would have no problem with prosecuting both - the victims are the customers whose data was exposed by AT&T).
The story here is not about the person, but about the prosecution. weev is an ass, but the story should be about the persecution from the US DoJ. Being an ass doesn't mean you're not entitled to fair justice.
Thanks to weev and his associates, my business partner, many of my volunteers, some family members of the above, and everybody who weev and his "trolls" could reach were subjected to a months-long campaign of constant harassement.
* One volunteer had to interview with Child Protective Services and the police because of false complaints made by weev and his friends.
* Another volunteer had trouble at her university because they tracked down her professors and made false claims.
* Our business faced several Denial of Service attacks and false complaints to our merchant processors and hosting providers.
* Harassing voicemails, phone calls, emails, IMs, IRC messages, etc etc etc.
The list of things that weev and the so-called Gay Niggers Association of America (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_Ameri...) did to us is pretty long. It's sad, really.
In the end, it stopped when (I can only assume) he got bored. We developed a strong relationship with our hosting provider, our new payment processor, and we did as much as we could to help people who were put in bad situations because of weev's actions. Ultimately, we lost some volunteers and bled money for 3 months, but we survived.
So, weev has a good enough story to get his "confession" in TechCrunch and on Twitter and people think that he's another example of the over-broad reach of law and the destruction of young lives by powerful corporations/organizations.
Maybe it is.
But if you value the legacy of Aaron Swartz, do not for one minute confuse him and Andrew Auernheimer. One was a man driven by a vision who helped defeat SOPA and did many other good and noble things, the other is a self-described troll who spent years of his life doing his best to extract "lulz" from the pain and suffering of his fellow human beings.