Man who hacked Scarlett Johansson's e-mail sentenced to 10 years

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/man-who-hacked-scarlett-johanssons-e-mail-sentenced-to-10-years/?comments=1

by Cadsby • 14 years ago

32 45 14 years ago

arstechnica.com

richforrester• 14 years ago

10 years seems a bit steep.

Wonder what Scarlett thinks of this; someone read her email, and is now in jail for 10 years.

ryanac• 14 years ago

Didn't he also publicly release nude photos of her and three other women? Still maybe a bit extreme on the sentence, but it wasn't just "reading e-mail".

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Yes he did. There is a strange cognitive dissonance between email and regular mail. If someone broke into an apartment lobby, picked the lock on the mailboxes, took out a set of film prints [1] from the drug store, made copies of the 'private and personal' pictures contained therein and then shared them with their friends for prurient reasons, what sort of punishment is deserved there?

The "virtual" nature of email makes it seem so much more distant than the reality of breaking and entering into someone elses home for the purposes of stealing their mail.

[1] Well presumably not surprising but there was an interesting arrest of a guy who did this at CostCo by searching through the finished pictures boxes looking for interesting pictures for his "collection."

SCdF• 14 years ago

Exactly. It's the kind of thing that for a large portion of the internet seems to be OK if it's celebrities and not OK if it's your girlfriend. I cannot comprehend how people think what he did is OK.

(note that I'm not arguing about the harshness of the sentence, or how it compares to each and every other sentence for each and every other crime. I'm just saying that what he did is not remotely OK).

betterunix• 14 years ago

There are entire websites dedicated to releasing nude photos of women without their permission. The only difference in this case is that these photos happened to feature wealthy celebrities; their media backers, as part of the effort to exploit these actresses, are calling in favors from powerful friends in the government. This is not an issue of invasions of privacy, it is a matter of the rich and powerful once again having the government serve them, while everyone else gets trampled.

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

Poor bastard. He did something that is unquestionably highly unethical and illegal, but he was also an awkward, messed-up nerdy guy who arguably just needed some real friends and a chance.

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201205/chris-chan...

Jagat• 14 years ago

Wait, can't the same argument be applied to certain sociopaths?

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

Are you implying that sociopaths should just be thrown in prison and left to rot?

Does anyone in the US pretend that prison should be rehabilitative? I'm sure that this guy serving 10 years in prison is going to be a net-positive for our society. /not

dmix• 14 years ago

Now when we discuss the legality of NSA having wide open access to citizen emails and other personal data, we'll have a good reference point on what happens when regular people do it.

evoxed• 14 years ago

I wonder which pays better, being a fall guy for News Corp or the NSA... either way, I'm sure it'll just mean one less salary to turn over at the end of the year.

da_n• 14 years ago

I don't know much about this story and certainly don't condone the behaviour, but from the article it seems all he was doing was abusing the password reset system offered by the service providers, which as anyone reading hacker news will know is a very flawed security model (I use random data for answers when they force security q/a). Not exactly high level hacking (it's no firesheep session hijack for example) so seems a bit harsh considering. Surely this is really an issue of a very bad security hole being abused, more responsibility should be directed to the email providers to get better with their security. Again not saying such behaviour should go unpunished, he deserves jail time certainly, but this should also be a clear signal that service providers need to get more serious about security and take more responsibility.

edited for clarity.

joonix• 14 years ago

More extreme sentencing. Long live the prison state.

tnuc• 14 years ago

He may have been better off murdering someone.

sixothree• 14 years ago

As long as that person was from a relatively low class.

veb• 14 years ago

10 years is far too long.

I agree the punishment for hacking emails should be harsh, because your email is your life. But not 10 years... because reading or leaking someone's email is not akin to killing them.

AutoKorrect• 14 years ago

So now that the court agrees that the sentence for hacking email is 10 years, when do we start convicting the entire NSA, AT&T, on up to the Executive head (the President) for doing this to the entire USA? If there is no conviction for these people, then he is clearly not being treated equally under the law, and deserves to be set free.

ahallock• 14 years ago

Because States do not universalize their own rules & laws. The exempt themselves, and are above the moral obligation that the rest of us are expected to follow. They also control the language and will create a vast set of euphemisms to excuse their contradictory behavior.

ChrisNorstrom• 14 years ago

This sentence is everything wrong with the American justice system. I do NOT want my tax payer dollars to be spent keeping a hacker in jail along with with murderers and rapists.

Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton drive around coked up and drunk and get either probation or a 1 month/1 year sentence but someone hacking a phone (who doesn't endanger anyone's life) gets 10 years???

adharmad• 14 years ago

Punishments in the US are not proportional to the crime committed, nor are they deterrent. They are simply a factor of who lobbied the government at that time to pass those laws. In some sense, they are random.

Sometimes, punishments for violent crimes are lower than those for downloading songs/movies or some victimless crimes like recreational drugs.

rpm4321• 14 years ago

Yes and no. I believe 10 years is obviously a bit much in this case, but if you tweak the variables a bit, this sort of thing can be tantamount to a sexual assault.

Imagine it's your sister or girlfriend involved, and the pictures are splashed across Facebook by an ex-boyfriend.

In this case, the victims are certainly less sympathetic, but the principle is basically the same.

It reminds me a bit of this Hunter Moore business: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890088

DanBC2• 14 years ago

I would be very angry. I would want the person to understand just how distressing their actions had been. I would want them to feel sorry for what they had done, and I would want them to know that this is not something that they will ever do again. I would want the person to make some kind of restitution.

Putting that person in prison achieves none of that.

Obviously, that's just my personal opinion, and I kind of understand that other people feel differently.

rhizome• 14 years ago

Imagine it's your sister or girlfriend involved...

If that's what justifies this degree of sentence, then I despair for our justice system (more than before). The principle you say is "basically the same," implies the standard should be "taking it personally." However, Lady Justice wears a blindfold as a symbol against just this reasoning.

garyrichardson• 14 years ago

Which is exactly why this is so stupid. If someone stole my identity and/or posted nude pics of myself it would be next to impossible for me bring the person to court and get a conviction, let alone put them in jail for 10 years.

vacri2• 14 years ago

Why do we have to imagine a sister or girlfriend, instead of ourselves?

Udo• 14 years ago

While I'm pretty sure that the length of his sentence is first and foremost a function of his victims' high profiles, a bit of background on his MO changed my mind about the importance of removing this guy from society:

http://news.yahoo.com/hollywood-hacker-honed-skills-years-07...

He really had this coming.

MichaelGG• 14 years ago

Do they go in with murderers and rapists? I was under the impression that hacking was a "white collar crime", and you'd most likely end up in prison camp. Or does the federal system not differentiate?

Anyways, this is not a case of some guy just accessing email. He "stole" identities, photographs and other stuff. According to the FBI site, he even continued to do so after his computers were raided.

Instead of thinking about the hacking, think about the actual damage of identity theft, invading privacy by leaking personal documents, and so on.

(Not that 10 years is a perfect sentence, and not that other sentencing makes sense.)

javajosh• 14 years ago

The lesson here is clear: if you have money, there is no such thing as crime. If you don't have money, like this guy, then even if you plead guilty you get years in prison.

HSBC can aid terrorists and launder money from drug cartels and pay a fine. Goldman Sachs knowingly sells junk to their clients, minimizing their own exposure to the financial crisis, and gets a bailout.

Fuck this shit.

daeken2• 14 years ago

> Goldman Sachs knowingly sells junk to their clients, minimizing their own exposure to the financial crisis, and gets a bailout.

GS never got a bailout. They were paid by AIG using bailout money, for what they were owed, but never received a bailout by the US government at all.

boboblong• 14 years ago

How is that any different?

themckman• 14 years ago

People seem to be focusing on this 10 year number and being really upset, but I'm wondering if anyone actually read the article. The article claims he had access to 50 email accounts and plead guilty to 9 counts of various charges. A linked document mentioned something about a "28-count superseding indictment", which I won't claim to understand. However, the point is, most people here appear, to me at least, that they think it's 1 person's email that he got access to. It's a little bit more than that.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

The US spends about $52 Billion on people in prison. There are about 2.3 million people in US prisons, with nearly 5 million people on parole.

The reason isn't because the US puts more people per year into prison; the reason is that the US keeps people in prison for so long.

The incredibly high prison rate has other weird effects. People are expected to die in prison but prison guards are not trained to deal with people at end of life. Dementia in particular is difficult for anyone to deal with.

I found this article moving:

Life, With Dementia (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...)

And here's another article about prison hospice:

(http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1121-prison-hospice-...)

We know that prison doesn't work for most prisoners. So why do we spend so much money keeping people there? (There are some people who deserve to be in jail, and who cannot live in wider society.)

harold• 14 years ago

Wow. He might have received less time for attempted murder [1]

http://themercury.com/articles/man-gets-5-years-for-murder-a...

m0nastic• 14 years ago

Here's a thought experiment:

Many people here seem to be okay with the idea of this being a punishable offense, but take issue with the length of the sentence (which I'll admit, seems excessive on first blush).

But what would an acceptable sentence be for hacking someone's email and then distributing their personal information? Maybe a year? That doesn't sound outrageous.

So if he did that, and was sentenced to a year in prison, and then got out and did it again, presumably another year in prison isn't unreasonable (you could argue for a harsher sentence because it was a repeat crime, but we'll ignore that).

So he did this to 50 different accounts. That's 50 separate crimes. He took a plea (which resulted in being found guilty of a lesser number of charges), and that got him 10 years.

I still think 10 years seems like a lot of time to spend in jail for a nonviolent crime, but shouldn't the number of crimes be used somehow in calculating a sentence?

sesqu2• 14 years ago

Yes, but not as a multiplier. After all, the threshold for a fifth crime is not equal to the threshold for the first.

Man who hacked Scarlett Johansson's e-mail sentenced to 10 years

Related Stories