Man Gets 10 Years For VoIP Hacking 149
angry tapir writes "A US court has sentenced a Venezuelan man to 10 years in prison for stealing and then reselling more than 10 million minutes of Internet phone service. Edwin Pena, 27, was convicted in February of masterminding a scheme to hack into more than 15 telecommunications companies and then reroute calls to their networks at no charge. He must also pay more than US$1 million in restitution, and will be deported once his sentence is served."
Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother serving sentence? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's wrong with that? (Score:1, Insightful)
Headline (Score:3, Insightful)
"Man gets 10 years for felony commercial theft of service".
There. FTFY.
No hacking involved here; nothing to see; move along.
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why bother serving sentence? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why bother spending some $800k on him in the first place if he's not wanted? So the next country gets a nice guy? Yeah. Right.
Either give him a few years and make a good citizen out of him, or kick him out of the country. Doing both is just plain stupid.
Re:Got what he deserved (Score:4, Insightful)
Except for the fact that the US judiciary system fails, once again? Not only are they spending a few hundred thousand dollars on making him pay in prison, his sentence his heftier than what a good bunch of rapists and cold blooded murderers would get, but after the supposed rehabilitation process, they're kicking him out of the country.
Being blind doesn't mean there's nothing to see, it just means there's something wrong with the way you see things.
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you think the EU would have handled it any differently? I don't. They deport people all the time.
I think the sentence is okay but excessive. 10 million minutes times 0.01 per minute (wholsesale) == $100,000 damage to the company. Ten years for stealing such a small amount of money is ridiculous, as is the extra 1 million fine on top of it. The CEOs stole 1,000,000 times that amount from US taxpayers and get no punishment.
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
If you just kick him out then you've created a whole army of criminals.
Someone needs killin', get a Mexican or Canadian across the border and have them kill them. If they gets caught they just gets sent home anyway - to sneak back across next time you need someone offed.
Foreigners should get a free try at robbing Americans blind, if they get away with it then they are rich. If they get caught they just get sent home just as if they never tried in the first place.
The prison system is not all about rehabilitation - there are at least three other components:
1. Keeping dangerous people away from society at large - clearly not an issue here since deporting does the same thing.
2. Deterring other people from doing the same thing by showing them the potential consequences - this clearly does apply here.
3. Retribution - just plain punishing the criminal for the sake of punishing them.
Different places have different emphasises on each element. Some leave some out entirely.
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not about owing him anything. It's about releasing a someone who will repeat he's crimes or someone who won't. I know what I prefer.
The pedophile will be released anyway. But I sure would prefer one that had psychological help and treatments to help prevent relapses than one who didn't.
Besides, we're talking about someone who "hacked" a VoIP system, it's not exactly a violent criminal. Keeping him among violent criminals for 10 years will certainly make him so, though.
Re:You know what gets me? (Score:4, Insightful)
He is being punished because he committed a crime, not because he's a clever geek.
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
A tertiary goal is still a goal. Like I said, it not that rehabilitation isn't important it's just not the entire point of a prison sentence. The GP I'm arguing with says we should just let the criminal go free since we're not going to keep him in our society. If the only point of prison was rehabilitation this would make sense. But punishment and deterrence have always been a factor is sentencing and as far as I'm concerned it should be.
The fact that you don't want jail to be an "easy ride" makes me think that you agree, but maybe you're not comfortable admitting that we're punishing fellow human beings by taking their freedoms away and locking them in a little room. "Rehabilitation" sounds a lot more pleasant, you can sentence someone to a lot of years of that without even feeling guilty and that's why it's dangerous to think that's the central tenant of what we're doing now cause it ain't even close and never has been. Jail is serious punishment, and should not be taken lightly.
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
You have nothing to worry about, they will just deport you
Re:Why bother serving sentence? (Score:3, Insightful)
We have had prisons for many years, yet people still commit crimes
True enough but the real and largely unanswerable questions are
1:How many more would commit crimes if there were no consequences to doing so?
2:Is locking people up the best type of consequence to use for deterrance purposes?
Re:Stupid criminal... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Computer Fraud and Wire Fraud, Some Hacking (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the general public considers port scanning and brute force attacks to be hacking. At least the news reports it as such.
You wouldn't?
I mean it's the most surefire way to get into a system. May take a while but if you can set up an attack that no one notices, you've got all the time in the world to go work your job, spend time with the wife, work up that Alabi, etc etc.
People have considered much less to be hacking. Some think that when you use social engineering to discover the answer to someone's secret question to access their twitter account that it's hacking... At least a port scan is something you wouldn't know about if you didn't at least have a basic understanding of how computer networks work.
Re:Interesting criminal justice system in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
1) retribution: basically, punishment. The prisoner is paying his debt to society. This also acts as a catharsis for the prisoner himself.
2) specific deterrence: The prisoner will think twice about committing another crime.
3) general deterrence: others will think twice about committing crime when they see others being jailed for it.
4) rehabilitation: so the prisoner can change his ways. Maybe he will learn skill for the outside world so that he need not turn to crime again.
5) utilitarian: somply to keep the prisoner from committing more crimes.
In this case, 2,3, and to some extent, 5 applies.
Seth
Re:Stupid criminal... (Score:3, Insightful)
My wife is very good to me for the most part. Sometimes she does get on my nerves when she pesters me to get things done and I wish she'd spend more time doing whatever it is she's spending the time insisting I need to do, but for the most part she gives me time to do my own thing, and really is only asking/reminding me to do my part. I get distracted and often put off doing chores so I can program, draw, work on a 3D model, do some word working, etc...
My wife is my best friend, she's hot, I enjoy her company and the sex is great... And she's a massage therapist so it's not hard to forgive her when she's being a "Mother Hen". Besides pretty soon we'll have kids and she can use all that time, energy and training she spent on me to pester them instead.
Re:Stupid criminal... (Score:4, Insightful)
More proof men are turning into submissive women.
And by that you really mean your bitter that your Mother/girl friend/wife/female boss/little sister orders you around and instead of seeing an successful/assertive women, you'd prefer to do what you're told and bitch about them behind their backs?
My wife does what I ask her because I respect her and do what she asks. Relationships are a two way street. Good luck getting in one.