Alleged eBay Hacker Goofs up and Goes to Jail

juliao writes "SecurityFocus is reporting that alleged eBay hacker Jerome Heckenkamp was jailed after his first solo court appearance." It's pretty funny actually, stuff like challenging the indictment on the grounds that they typed his name in all capital letters, demanding to immediately testify (even tho they were only there to schedule the trial), threatening the judge and so on. He would know better if he watched a couple episodes of Law & Order. Note that I base all court proceedings on the wisdom of Sam Watterston.

Ouch..

[niftyeric]

Heckenkamp had been free on $50,000 bail, and living under electronic monitoring -- prohibited by court order from using cell phones, the Internet, computers, video games and fax machines.

Do I really need to say more? :P
Ah well, he shouldn't have been so stupid I guess.

AKA - MagicFX

[keep_it_simple_stupi]

Jerome Heckenkamp, aka MagicFX, also brought down a major porn site [ourfirsttime.com] not too long ago, redirecting visitors to Disney's website [disney.com].

I like his style!

More info here [wired.com].

The capital letters issue

[zzyzx]

Believe it or not, the names in all capital letters is one of the things that conspiracy theorists try to use. A fun read is the destroyed arguments [hiwaay.net] section of the Dixieland Law Journal. That page is a conspiracy site telling other conspiracy people that they're being a little too out there. The capital letters issue is explained and debunked [hiwaay.net] at a link there.

two kinds of insanity

[aunchaki]

or he is going for an insaniy plea ..

Keep in mind there are two different sanity defenses:

1) being insane at the time of the act

2) being insane at the time of the trial

The first is about the defendant's state of mind when the act was committed (and is basically an admission of committing the act).

The second is about the defendant's ability to contribute to his/her own defense.

Re:A fool for a client

[Madduck]

According to the Quotable Lawyer, edited by David Shrager and Elizabeth
Frost, New England Publishing Associates, Inc., 1986, p. 49, that saying is
a proverb apparently so old that its original author is not known. They
quote it as, "He that is his own lawyer has a fool for a client." They cite
Rosalind Fergusson, The Facts on File Dictionary of Proverbs, 1983.

or militia movement

[Velex]

There are a few people who belive that the Sixteenth Amendment was never ratified that think that your name in all caps is the name of a legal fiction. I tried to understand the thinking behind that, but it involves conspiracy theories and a general detachment from reality. They also belive that the two letter postal code abbreviations for states represent different states than the ones that you write out longhand.

Re:I weep for the future

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to be intelligent to be a script kid.

Script kid? Do we have to call him a script kid? Is it really that hard to believe that an intelligent computer expert could also be a crackpot?

Let's look at the facts. Heckenkamp graduated from college at age 18. He received his masters degree in computer science at age 20. He was subseqently employed by Los Alamos National Labs and was hired to teach programming at the University of New Mexico. Doesn't sound like a script kiddie.

What it does sound like is mental illness. He seems extremely literal minded, incapable of recognizing social hierarchies or understanding other people's motivations (which is why he can't seem to form an persuasive argument in court). These traits are somewhat common amongst hardcore computer programmers, just carried out to an extreme in his case.

Re:He needs to try the Chewbacca defense

[PantyChewer]

Actually Endor is a moon ("The forrest moon of Endor") not a planet, and Chewbacca doesn't live there, he just visited it...

Re:Imagine the court reporter

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude - it's called HUMOR. Try looking into it some time.

Re:Sam Watterson?

[shatteredpottery]

Agreed. Jill H. was the best. FWIW, I just read in the paper a couple of days ago that Michael Moriarty lives in Vancouver, Canada. Short version, from memory, so there will be some inaccuracies:

He moved to Canada a few years ago. His alcoholism got out of control. In the meantime, he managed to legally immigrate. Then he sobered up, moved to (I think) Alberta, where he was going to run for parliament.

Somehow, that didn't work out. So he moved to Vancouver with his wife (?). He fell off the wagon again, got tossed in jail for domestic assault (he started screaming at her and slapped her in a restaurant).

She didn't press charges, but they're still thinking about prosecuting anyway. In the meantime, he's living in a trailer (or traileresque home, hard to tell from the newspaper picture). Apparently he doesn't do much but come into Vancouver to drink and fight. Some guys even beat him up a few weeks back, jumped him when he was leaving a bar. Put him in the hospital.

By most accounts, he's actually quite similar in personality to his character on Law & Order. He seems to have a lot of friends who will speak up/look out for him, so I suspect, as always, there's more to the story than what one reads in the paper.

Re:or militia movement

[gorilla]

It wasn't a case of 'too much', early computers simply could not handle mixed case. ASCII-1963 only had defined character positions for A to Z, as did Sixbit encoding. ASCII-1963 was extended in 1967 to encode a to z as well, but sixbit simply couldn't. There were only 63 possible codes, 26 for letters, 10 for numerals, 17 for other characters, and the remaining 10 for control codes. That left no space to encode the lower case letters too.

Sixbit is ultimatly why MS-DOS had 3 name extensions and wasn't case sensitive. 3 sixbit characters fit very nicely into 18 bits, and early DEC computers were 18 bit systems. CP/M was developed to be partially a lookalike of these DEC computers, and MS-DOS was initially a clone of CP/M.

Re:two kinds of insanity

[ninewands]

Keep in mind there are two different sanity defenses:

1) being insane at the time of the act

2) being insane at the time of the trial

Errrrrmmmm ... no.

The insanity defense goes to the existence of a culpable mind state at the time of the alleged offense, ONLY. It is an affirmative defense to criminal liability (which means that even if the defendant did the deed exactly as he is accused of having done, he cannot be guilty because he was insane and, therefore, lacked a culpable mind-state).

Insanity at the time of the trial is "lack of competency to stand trial" and merely postpones the proceedings until the defendant can be rendered competent by therapy, drugs, ECT, whatever the psychiatric community's "silver bullet du jour" might be. It does nothing to keep you from going to prison.

As I see it, this guy is merely showing his complete contempt for the law, the proceedings and the court. That being said, I hope he likes coveralls, because the attitude he seems to display is going to have him wearing them for quite a while.

Re:All capital letters as a defense....

[Anonymous Coward]

legally, all capital letters signifies a corporation, or a ficticious entity.

Uhh, yes we're laughing at him. And now we're laughing at you.

From http://www.adl.org/mwd/suss4.htm [adl.org]:

tax evader complained of "his name being in capital letters in a prior order issued by this Court and then ... makes an incorrect reference to this form of using all capital letters as being proper only in reference to corporate entities.

This is an incorrect statement of the law and ... is illustrative of [his] continued harassing and frivolous behavior."

Re:prize?

[Farce Pest]

http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html

Serious Psychological Difficulties

[penguin_nipple]

This guy isn't just eccentric, from what the article is suggesting, he has symptoms of Oppositional Defiant Disorder and/or Oppositional Conduct Disorder. These are real disorders, which affect people across a broad range of society. Here's some info on ODD [klis.com] have a peek and tell me this guy is not suffering from a psychological disorder.

For those of you who would rather not click through:

A pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least six months during which four or more of the following are present:

1. often loses temper
2. often argues with adults
3. often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults' requests or rules
4. often deliberately annoys people
5. often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
6. is often touchy or easily annoyed by others
7. is often angry and resentful
8. is often spiteful and vindictive

Although the website has more info.

P.S. funny how that brief view of ODD describes alot of slashdot users! hahaha...smile, it's a joke

Re:Why is everyone taking this as a joke?

[lamont116]

The reason he fired his attorney is that she told him he would lose the case if he plead not guilty [securityfocus.com]. Now I don't know about you, but if I was innocent and my lawyer told me to plead guilty or go to jail, I'd start looking for new representation too.

In federal court, you do not want to go to trial and be found guilty. The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines practically ensure that you will get a longer sentence if you go to trial (no 2- or 3- level reduction for "acceptance of responsibility" and possible 2-level enhancement for "obstruction of justice" if you testify and the judge decides that you lied on the stand, as a starting point). You are better off pleading to the original charge (even if no reduced charge is available) than being found guilty. A lawyer who doesn't urge a clearly guilty defendant to plead is not doing her job, especially in a federal criminal case, and some lawyers have been found constitutionally ineffective when a client receives a long sentence following trial having rejected a plea offer (see Boria v. Keane in the Second Circuit; sorry, don't have a cite).

Re:Idiot legal arguments: capitalized name

[MillionthMonkey]

Some tax evader arguments are really funny. They always start with something like a clerical error, then build up and up- and in the middle, you hear something like "...and therefore the entire federal government is illegitimate...". They all end the same way- nobody owes any taxes.
I especially like this one: Is U.S. income tax invalid because Ohio wasn't legally a state when the 16th amendment was ratified? [straightdope.com] On the 150th anniversary of Ohio's statehood, someone looked in the archives and realized that there had been an oversight, and that Ohio had never been formally admitted to the Union. (Statehood admission was handled much more casually back in 1803.) So in 1953 they introduced a bill making Ohio a state, retroactively until 1803. The tax evaders say that since Congress can't make laws ex post facto, Ohio wasn't a state all those years. The ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1911 was therefore invalid, because it was introduced to Congress by the Taft administration, and Taft couldn't legally be president since he was born in Cincinatti and was therefore not a citizen.
There's another rumor going around about how the IRS is paying reparations for slavery to anyone who can prove they're descended from slaves. And I remember hearing once about how "all taxes are voluntary", but I forget the details of how that one works.