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Crime The Courts Security

Aaron Swartz's Federal Judge Gives Anonymous Hacker 10 Years In Prison For DDoS Attacks On Children's Hospitals (zdnet.com) 227

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.
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Aaron Swartz's Federal Judge Gives Anonymous Hacker 10 Years In Prison For DDoS Attacks On Children's Hospitals

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  • by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @03:27PM (#57955572) Homepage

    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.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The 680 pages is because lawyer scum get paid per hour.

      Fat document = nice fees = profit.

    • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @03:57PM (#57955690)

      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.

      Basically, The lady doth protest too much, methinks [wikipedia.org].

      Reminds me of the (literally) hundreds of Tweets I've seen from some idiot saying something about "no collusion" ...

    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @04:06PM (#57955722)

      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.

      • Parole for murderers (Score:4, Interesting)

        by BankRobberMBA ( 4918083 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @04:18PM (#57955768)

        The difference here is that he's going into the Feds. There is no parole in the Feds, except for convictions prior to 1987 or military convictions.

        If he does not lose any of his good time for disciplinary infractions he will do about 87% of his sentence, so about 8 years, 9 months.

        Sentences tend to be longer in the Feds, but the treatment tends to be better (not 100% of the time) and there is generally less violence.

        Having said all of that, I agree with you that we should seriously rethink how we use prisons.

      • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @04:21PM (#57955780) Journal

        > Prisons should only be for people that are physically dangerous. For everyone else, there are more constructive punishments.

        I would say attacking the systems used to care for critically ill children is physically dangerous. I'm sure the doctors and nurses did their best to care for the kids despite the attacks; I'm also sure that they use computerized systems to improve the quality of care.

        You mentioned parole. He can get time off for good behavior.

        I don't necessarily have an opinion on what his sentence should be, and I don't know if that is controlled by what some other person got for some other crime. I don't know enough about the facts of the case, ornhis history. Sentencing decisions are also just plain very difficult. I do see this as physically dangerous, taking out the hospital's electronic systems reduces their ability to care for very sick children.

        I also note that someone who has already attacked a children's hospital has demonstrated that they are able and willing to harm sick kids. I don't really want to give him a chance to see what he does next. I particularly don't want to trust him hanging out in the very hospitals he attacked, which he now has even more rage against since it's their fault he's sentenced to his prison (in his mind). I wouldn't want him anywhere near my kid if she were hospitalized.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          The whole point was to get publicity, not fuck with anyone's medical care.

          And any hospital using their public facing web infrastructure directly attached to their critical systems backend is a fucking retard to begin with. HIPAA requires medical information to be secured (although not secure enough in my opinion) and common network systems engineering never has you putting critical systems on a publicly disclosed and accessable system. Anything critical should at minimum be behind a vpn with DoS protection

          • But a nonprofit organization lives from donations made through its webpage. No direct care was likely impacted, but for kids and families that are relying on them for care, the loss of an external facing website means no donations, no links served for more information, no status of prior giving, etc. This was about inflicting pain on their main source of income that lets them stay open.

          • If you're "pretty sure" of that, you don't know anything about the case and you're just "pretty sure" of whatever you imagine, for no reason whatsoever.

              He attacked the class B network, 65,536 IP addresses, serving the hospital district, knocking not only that hospital, but other hospitals offline. His attack lasted two weeks.

          • by flink ( 18449 )

            There are plenty of interoperability functions like HIE interfaces that hang out on the public internet. They are secured but can be DDOS'd. Taking them down won't get anyone killed most likely, but will lower the overall quality of care as staff get spread more thinly having to handle things over the phone/fax that should be handled electronically.

            Also some facilities that are part of larger care networks have their EMRs tightly coupled with their parent org through cloud services. I'm not sure what ef

        • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @05:04PM (#57955988)

          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 [wikipedia.org], 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.

          • You are working under the mistaken assumption that people are rational... If they were, we would be living in an entirely different world.

            • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @06:49PM (#57956370)

              You are working under the mistaken assumption that people are rational...

              95% of people are rational about incarceration. The other 5% are Americans.

              If they were, we would be living in an entirely different world.

              Nope. Just a different country.

              • 95% of people are rational about incarceration.

                Globally? No way! Maybe in Sweden and Norway...

                • I like to chat with foreign visitors passing through the city. Based on this small sample I think Bill is right.

                  There is this basically satanic attitude that says: "woo hoo he he lock them up in a torture camp _forever_!!! ah ha ha ha!!!" Only Americans have that attitude.

                  Euros, Asians, Africans, South Americans - all of them have far more Christan, forgiving attitudes. All of them are horrified by the Stalinesque kangaroo courts and gulag we've built here.

                  Fellow Americans, let's ask ourselves some hard que

          • So what do you want to do? Free all the non-violent offenders and find more appropriate sentences? Can you imagine the headlines?

            "Trump Frees Tens of Thousands of White Men"

            You cannot do anything in America if it disproportionately effects one race. Incarcerating non-violent offenders helps slightly to fix the prison gap. Treating non-violent criminals differently than violent ones is putting Black Americans at the back of the bus.

        • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @10:00PM (#57957034) Homepage Journal

          You DO know that a hospital's web pages and business admin don't run in the same space as the patient monitors, right?

          • You know the medical district he attacked uses networking for more than just their web page, don't you?

            He attacked the class B network, 65,536 IP addresses, serving the hospital district, knocking not only that hospital, but other hospitals offline. His attack lasted two weeks. Doctors do use the internet, you know - they don't keep all the world's medical knowledge in their head.

          • You know when the doctor does the examination and then you have to wait in the little room? He's out there googling your symptoms.
            • by sjames ( 1099 )

              My doctor doesn't do that. If a doctor actually did need google (that could happen sometimes), he has a smart phone with a browser.

              Of course the hospital's web presence may not even be hosted in the same state, mush less on the same subnet as their gateway.

    • one the right wing press ran with [google.com] 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.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        That said, like I said I can't tell if the Pelletier case is another example of that or if it's a real case of a hospital overreaching it's mandate. I'm inclined to think the former though as the few cases I've read about where the parents said "We just want to take our child to another doctor" it later came out they were lying.

        It's been four years since the case. The short version is that Justina Pelletier was dying when she was in the "care" of Boston Children's and recovered completely after she was rescued, thanks to the efforts of (among others) Martin Gottesfeld. It really doesn't get much more cut and dry than that.

        He literally helped save her life with his DDOS.

      • by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @05:02PM (#57955972)

        one the right wing press ran with [google.com] 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 [mitochondr...senews.com] that she had.

        I think the hospital was worried about was a Munchausen by proxy [uofmhealth.org] 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.

        • One of the point if you look around for more balanced article, is that the dr korson at the time had not done a muscle biopsy (one diagnosis which is deemed necessary - and reading what he told over the year about his method of "clumping" versus "scattering" diagnosis this brings up certain doubt about him). And certainly there was no mitochondrial genetic analyzes.
          • by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @07:12PM (#57956474)

            One of the point if you look around for more balanced article, is that the dr korson at the time had not done a muscle biopsy (one diagnosis which is deemed necessary - and reading what he told over the year about his method of "clumping" versus "scattering" diagnosis this brings up certain doubt about him). And certainly there was no mitochondrial genetic analyzes.

            Couple of things: 1) I can tell you are not a parent, 2) most juries are composed mostly of parents

            Maybe perhaps the hospital should have done one of those first before resorting to CPS? As for what you say, it seems to be true. Its also true they didn't know any of it when they called in CPS. They would have had to contact the geneticist first for them to know that. They only found this information out after CPS had taken the child. So its more papering over what they did rather than admitting what they did. The fact that they can do this now, and that they are willing to throw a fellow medical researcher under the bus to do it, should tell you what they are willing to do to get out of this one.

            The dumbest thing the hospital has done so far (other than the original mistakes) was to not settle immediately. The hospital can quibble and go back and forth about mitochondrial issues and all its going to do is make the jury want to hang them more. Because the simple fact is, they didn't know any of it when they called CPS in the first place. And the fact that there is clearly medical uncertainty here, will count against them. People will quite reasonably have the attitude that "YOU(the hospital) SHOULD HAVE BEEN SURE BEFORE CALLING CPS". Anything that counts against that no matter how complex or smart or medically sound, will get them into even more trouble. Before you take people's kids, you have to be sure. Anything that seems to go against that simple premise will get harshly rebuffed by almost any jury. You want to see an outrageous legal settlement? Argue that you should be able to take people's kids without due processes or even reviewing all the information at hand.

            • It's fun how you lie about the parents having genetic evidence, get called out for lying about it, and then respond to the guy who called you out with "hurr, durr, well you're not a parent".

              I can tell you really care about what's true. They should like totally have you on that jury.

              • genetic

                Dude, in simpler words its called "running in the family". And indeed, an older sibling did have a mitochondrial condition. And for that sibling, a biopsy had indeed been done that confirmed the disease.

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        This is kind of the opposite of your first case. The parents wanted her to continue being treated at Tufts for an inherited mitochondrial disorder but BCH decided it was a psychological issue so they grabbed custody (claiming Munchhausen by proxy), took her off her meds and locked her in the psych ward. So really, BCH is playing the role of the fundamentalist parents.

        • Children's Hospital is one of the Harvard hospitals. As you might imagine, the doctors there have VERY big egos. And they are socially VERY well connected.

          Presumably that's why Judge Gorton, himself a Dartmouth and Columbia grad, ordered such totally disproportionate punishment. Wouldn't want to upset the old boy's club, you know. Gotta keep those uppity proles in their place.

    • Did you RTFA? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by p4nther2004 ( 1171621 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @06:03PM (#57956184)

      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.

      He brings in his kid because there's a specialist at the hospital that can help.

      Others at the hospital look at his kid - refuse to send the kid the specialist. When he tries to get his kid back, they accuse him of child abuse and take his kid.

    • Maybe it's like a Youtube video and has to be a certain length before you can make money off of it.

    • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @09:56PM (#57957012) Homepage Journal

      You should do a lot more background reading. The child in question was the victim of a "medical kidnapping" being held in a psych ward and denied necessary medication. It seems the doctors at that hospital disagreed with doctors at another hospital and they were willing to keep her locked up to prevent the parents from transferring her.

      This is an uncommon but growing problem.

      Eventually, with mounting publicity and legal pressure, the child was released and is now slowly improving. Some of that publicity came from the DDOS making the news.

    • It looks like he took their Web site offline. If he actually did anything that endangers life and limb...well, that's the one thing I plan to leave in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as criminal; everything else--knocking out your Web site, for example--is a civil matter. We already have financial fraud laws.

      The law is pretty much written like this: "BEING THAT HACKERS ARE SCARY WIZARDS AND MERE MORTALS CANNOT COMPREHEND THEIR AWESOME POWER, THOSE WHO USE THEIR WIZARDRY FOR EVIL ARE WITCHES AND SHALL

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13, 2019 @04:16PM (#57955764)

    First, the government taking kids away from their parents, in violation of their constitutional rights, is a never-ending source of violence between the public and government. I don't need to mention the police and sheriffs don't want to get involved in a lot of that. The correct check on that power is a jury trial, not just because it's guarunateed by the constitution as custody is a right that cannot be taken away without due process, but also because ultimately, its the public that has to bore the fallout of the violence and drama that these kinds of situations produce. If the situation is dire, charge the parents, put them through a speedy trial, this is reasonable. I've seen news stories just like this since the 90's and the body count from this shit has to literally thousands of cops, parents and kids a year. Enough is enough. We need to fix this.

    Understand, the reason he attacked the hospital is because he genuinely thought the hospital was unduley enriching itself by kidnapping children. And if they were, what mechanisms exist in society to stop that? Lawsuits? They're generally immune. Administrative oversight? When was the last time a doctor was tried and convicted for malpractice? About the only check and balance, sadly, is lead. That is a serious problem and needs to change.

    Second, this is an impressive 86-page handwritten letter and hundreds of pages of news articles and other research. He's got enough here to show the judges are being paid and we need to start getting polices and sherrifs involved to investigate and ensure we don't have a pedophilia ring operating here, or something worse.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      >Understand, the reason he attacked the hospital is because he genuinely thought the hospital was unduley enriching itself by kidnapping children.

      And the guy who shot up Comet Pizza really believed there were child sex slaves in the basement. Sorry, believing stupid isn't a defense for criminal behavior.

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Hospitals and governments don't just take on kids for no reason at all. It typically happens in extremely abusive situations. Mothers especially have exemptions from most abuse and child protection laws, it must go pretty far for a family court to NOT award custody to the mother, let alone, not to either parent or grandparent etc because usually one of them is considered reasonable enough.

      I've been on committees that oversaw Jehovah's Witness hospital cases, they'd let their children die over violating thei

      • by sfcat ( 872532 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @05:49PM (#57956140)

        Hospitals and governments don't just take on kids for no reason at all. It typically happens in extremely abusive situations. Mothers especially have exemptions from most abuse and child protection laws, it must go pretty far for a family court to NOT award custody to the mother, let alone, not to either parent or grandparent etc because usually one of them is considered reasonable enough.

        I've been on committees that oversaw Jehovah's Witness hospital cases, they'd let their children die over violating their leaders' rules. In most cases, state or hospital custody was a rare and temporary situation only after serious complications of the alternative treatments their own leaders recommended hadn't yet killed the child and as soon as treatment was done, custody was reverted (and in some cases, the parents then dismissed the child from the hospital and flew to a hospital where a religious 'doctor' was present - a few of those doctors later on lost their accreditation).

        Thanks for the red herring that has absolutely nothing to do with the case being discussed and in fact is the exact opposite of this case. In your case, it was the parents ignoring science. In this case, it was the hospital ignoring the science and facts. Your outrage to those religious nut parents should be equal to your outrage at a hospital taking a child without doing even the most cursory and easy checks about anything specific to this child's situation.

        There is a reason you were asked to weight in on the ethical situations you discussed. In this case, that didn't happen. That's the problem. That's why people are pissed...

        • by guruevi ( 827432 )

          This case was about a child with munchhausen that the parents believed to be real. The child was put in psychiatric care and custody awarded to the state by a judge.

          Unless you believe the judge was in on the "hospital making profits", once it goes past a trial, the judge must have had serious proof the parents were both wrong and non-cooperative to award custody to someone else, a judge will demand second opinions from third parties. The hospital can't tell their side of the story to the media so you have t

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by sfcat ( 872532 )

            This case was about a child with munchhausen that the parents believed to be real. The child was put in psychiatric care and custody awarded to the state by a judge.

            Unless you believe the judge was in on the "hospital making profits", once it goes past a trial, the judge must have had serious proof the parents were both wrong and non-cooperative to award custody to someone else, a judge will demand second opinions from third parties. The hospital can't tell their side of the story to the media so you have to ignore everything the parents say on the topic and look at the outcome.

            At least that's a better theory. But consider this, how certain would you have to be to call CPS in such a situation. Wouldn't you at least review the various diagnoses? Wouldn't you contact the patient's doctor? I bet you would. I hope I would. I expect almost anyone would. They didn't...

            No sane person thinks the judge was in on it. That different judge reversed the original judge's decision when more facts came to light is seriously damning to the hospital. That's why she is back with her paren

            • by c6gunner ( 950153 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @10:16PM (#57957062) Homepage

              Wouldn't you at least review the various diagnoses? Wouldn't you contact the patient's doctor? I bet you would. I hope I would. I expect almost anyone would. They didn't...

              You are lying again. Dr Peters reviewed her diagnostic history in detail; in fact this was part of what led him to suspect parental abuse. He noted that she had had multiple interventions with numerous specialists, and yet none of that had led to any actually unifying diagnosis.

              Earlier you suggested that the hospital didn't know that the doctor who diagnosed her with myto hadn't done a muscle biopsy, but this also is a lie; Peters wrote in his initial assessment that "Metabolic workup was unremarkable" and "She has not had a muscle biopsy". He knew these things exactly because he had reviewed her history.

              It's also worth noting that part of her history was the fact that doctors at Tufts - a completely seperate hospital - had also made allegations with CPS suggesting that the parents were neglecting Justina. How wide do you imagine that this grand conspiracy is?

              That different judge reversed the original judge's decision when more facts came to light is seriously damning to the hospital. That's why she is back with her parents.

              You are still lying. It wasn't a different judge, it was the same judge, and the reason she is back with her parents is because he decided that they had changed their behaviour enough to justify letting them have custody again. Feel free to read his words instead of making shit up:

              https://www.bostonglobe.com/me... [bostonglobe.com]

              • by sfcat ( 872532 )
                You are completely reinventing the timeline here. Your link says nothing about the parents, the child or her behavior. Its incredibly vague and lays out no facts either supporting or denying your assertions. In fact, it just standard CTS legal boilerplate and is put into about every time CTS has to give kids back to the parents. The doctor at Tufts you reference was called by the hospital and had no experience with Justina before the case started. At the time CTS was called, the doctor's at children's
                • You are ever bit as bad as the right-wingers you hate.

                  That's pretty funny. Half of Slashdot thinks I'm a far right Nazi, the other half apparently thinks I'm an antifa goon. You're all retarded.

                  You decided about this case before you ever heard the facts because of who was upset about it.

                  I decided about the case after reviewing the actual evidence; you don't care about evidence which is why you repeatedly keep lying about it. The ONLY thing you got right is that the doctors at Children's didn't bother talking to the goof who diagnosed her with mito; an irrelevant factoid which has no bearing on anything. Pretty much everything else you have said -

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            That is what the hospital alleges. Other doctors maintain that there was a genuine physical problem that needed actual treatment. In other words, the experts didn't agree, so it'd a bit extreme to claim the parents are abusive because they believe doctor A rather than doctor B.

            Note that the child's health declined while in the psych ward. She is now back with her parents and improving.

    • Was the hospital the "government"? I know these cases bring out all the anti-government people, but it's not always the government doing this. Doctors take an oath to always provide the best care for their patients - maybe they disagree with the parents and maybe they make mistakes, but they don't do this because there's an evil government telling them to hurt a child.

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        In this case, the government simply acted as a bludgeon in the hands of the hospital.

    • He's got enough here to show the judges are being paid and we need to start getting polices and sherrifs involved to investigate and ensure we don't have a pedophilia ring operating here, or something worse.

      Actually, there is: Feds: Boston Children's Hospital doctor charged with receiving child porn [cnn.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward

    From Gottesfeld's indictment document:

    Gottesfeld, using the Twitter handle, "Stoploganriver" in dm with one of the unindicted co-conspirators:

    Mar 22, 2014 3:35 PM EST @Stoploganriver: “so far I haven't been
    sued/arrested. I've been pretty careful. If they do, it's not the end of the
    world though. I'm prepared.”

    C'mon, cheer up, Marty. You were prepared for this. Serving prison time and paying $440,000 in restitution is not the end of the world. You're lucky the Feds couldn't plausibly link you to any patient that purportedly suffered any detrimental effects due to your DDOSing of the hospitals, otherwise you'd be in much longer than the 10years you've already been sentenced.

  • 690 page manifesto (Score:4, Informative)

    by NynexNinja ( 379583 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @09:02PM (#57956846)

    It's funny that this document, which is mostly hand written, would be considered a "conflicts of interest" document. None of it actually contains any conflicts of interest. All of it includes a rambling story of a manifesto which includes reasons why some person was harmed by a hospital group, as if this were the justification to do damage to the hospital group to avenge the harm that was done to some person...

    If the guy is looking for a defense, he's only using a shovel to dig his hole deeper by producing and submitting such a document to a court of law. The judge is rightfully correct in giving the unremorseful defendant such a long prison sentence. This person obviously cannot be rehabilitated, and the only protection from society from such a person with no conscience is a long prison sentence. He suffers from mental illness if he thinks his manifesto describing his reasons for revenge are going to have any positive impact on the judges decision. Anyone reading that document probably thinks the guy is a lunatic who deserves ten years in prison for what he did. He obviously does not regret what he did. To the contrary, he authored a 690 page manifesto describing why it deserves to be done. What a psychopath.

    • by Miser ( 36591 )

      So, let's just say he has mental illness.

      Going to prison and not being treated correctly for this mental illness is going to solve the problem, how?

  • Between Aaron Swartz and this clown, it sounds like he knows exactly who needs to spend time behind bars. We need more like him.

  • Don't vilify this judge for prosecuting Aaron Swartz. Swartz broke the law plain and simple and got the penalty he deserved under the law. He should have accepting this fact, served his punishment, and moved on with his life.

    Unfortunately, he did not choose to serve his punishment and move on with his life for reasons only he knows.

  • by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Sunday January 13, 2019 @10:30PM (#57957088) Journal

    Sorry, but if you DDOS a hospital, fuck you. I sincerely hope you spend a significant amount of time in prison. And I don't mean a year or two.

    I have absolutely zero sympathy for assholes like this.

  • This comment was written to remove my moderations in this thread.
    I f*cked up.

  • Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday January 14, 2019 @05:50AM (#57957896)
    He attacked a children's hospital and then has the temerity to think he's some kind of hero activist. He's a self-important jerk and his ass is going to be in jail for 10 years. I hope he gets to enjoy every last minute of it.

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