'Anonymous' Hacktivist Martin Gottesfeld Said To Be Held In Solitary Confinement (creators.com) 132
Slashdot reader reader Danngggg has been keeping us up-to-date about the case of Marty Gottesfeld, the Anonymous hacktivist initially prosecuted by the same U.S. attorney who prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide:
Anonymous hacktivist Marty Gottesfeld was first covered by Slashdot in 2016, when he was rescued by at sea by a Disney cruise liner and then arrested by the FBI.... He's been practicing journalism from inside the Bureau of Prisons, most recently highlighting sexual abuse....
Marty's home for the last three years [has been] the "Communications Management Unit" at FCI Terre Haute, in Terre Haute, Indiana. The CMU was created in 9/11 era to hold terrorists.... In August prison officials told him that he was being recommended to "step down" out of the CMU. But this week he was transferred to the other CMU in Marion, Illinois.
They are keeping him in indefinite solitary confinement without cause or explanation; Sunday marked the beginning of month five.
One of these two CMUs is likely where the U.S. will place Assange if extradited.
Marty's home for the last three years [has been] the "Communications Management Unit" at FCI Terre Haute, in Terre Haute, Indiana. The CMU was created in 9/11 era to hold terrorists.... In August prison officials told him that he was being recommended to "step down" out of the CMU. But this week he was transferred to the other CMU in Marion, Illinois.
They are keeping him in indefinite solitary confinement without cause or explanation; Sunday marked the beginning of month five.
One of these two CMUs is likely where the U.S. will place Assange if extradited.
"prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide" (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:"prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide" (Score:4, Insightful)
Google it and make up your own mind, although by the fact you're posting as AC, and the way you ask the question, you most likely have already made up your mind.
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Do you think he would have killed himself if he had not been being hounded?
He doesn't seem to have been all that stable, but pretty much everybody who knew him thinks that the prosecution is what pushed him over the edge. This is common knowledge; nobody has to provide a citation for a peripheral mention of it. If you don't happen to have that knowledge, you can look it up. There are roughly 10 billion sources on the Internet.
You could reasonably ask whether a prosecutor should be expected to let up on the
Re: "prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide" (Score:1)
Re: "prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide" (Score:3, Interesting)
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To ad insult to injury, all the content he bulk downloaded is now openly given via bulk downloads to the public.
Re: "prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide" (Score:4, Informative)
Furthermore, the content was already free at the time he stole it. His offense was attaching his own laptop to a library server and running a script to download every article to make some political point, which slowed down the network for regular users of the library.
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Re: "prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide" (Score:4, Insightful)
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They need to patch this game and add new dialog to the NPCs.
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Being a life-long pedant, I presume they meant, "He was rescued by at sea a Disney cruise liner," but surely the unwashed masses would prefer a different location for the preposition.
Re:"prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide" (Score:4, Informative)
I'd say facing 50 years in jail for what amounts to copyright infringement suggests it's true.
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You might also face multiple life sentences if you kill someone. Usually doesnt happen though.
You can do time for speeding. Usually doesnt happen.
Nobody has been honest about this. Definitely not you.
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Nobody has been honest about this. Definitely not you.
And especially not the federal prosecutor.
Re:"prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide" (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're going to lie about the nature of the complaint you can make almost anything sound reasonable, or unreasonable.
If he was accused of mass murder, 50 years would be light!
What if, rather than copyright infringement, he was accused of two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for planting a networked computer in the ceiling of MIT building and using it to bypass MIT access restrictions remotely?
Furthermore, under US sentencing guidelines he was only facing 3-5 years, though a lesser sentence was likely. He was offered a plea agreement where the prosecutor would ask for a 6 month sentence, and he would be able to ask for a lesser sentence, and he would likely have received only probation.
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Has /. really stooped this low?
I think somewhere around 2006.
Did you just make it back to the surface, or were you "out of town?"
Re:"prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide" (Score:5, Insightful)
As a fellow left-winger: please stop it! You accuse people on the right of false equivocations and then you proceed to falsely equivocate all right-wingers as lying fascists. Just because someone has a point of view that differs from ours doesn't make them a fascist nor does it make them a liar. We're not going to resolve our differences with the other side if we're constantly portraying everyone with a different viewpoint as being an extremist. There are enough actual extremists on the right and accusing people slightly right-of-center as being extremists just pushes them further to the right and creates a neverending cycle. We need to recognize our own role in the rise of right-wing extremism, tamp down on the rhetoric, and de-escalate the situation to a point that a rational conversation between the two sides can exist again, at least for the people who aren't already too far gone.
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Fascism properly defined is not dissimilar to state capitalism or state socialism, both of which tend to evolve into that which maximizes the interests of the state and/or those which own and/or are owned by it. State controlling corporations, or corporations controlling states, but, in either case, roughly the same people in charge of both, and promoting their own interests, which only by accident may coincide with the interests of others.
I would prefer, over either one, that condition wherein economic ac
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Maybe I’m wrong. If I am, I’ll be the first in line to admit it and learn Chinese. However, China is easily triple our size, with a roughly equivalent size economy. That only works if the average US worker is at least triple as productive as the average Chinese worker. Their system has NOT pr
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Re: "prosecuted Aaron Swartz into suicide" (Score:2)
Sorry, but there's no room for compromise with Nazis. One side is operating in good faith while the other is not, and in such times there can be no middle ground.
Google the 'Paradox of Tolerance.'
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No room for compromise with totalitarians of the leftist, socialist, communist, or Marxist variety either.
Sorry.
I will oppose and fight totalitarianism no matter the excuse, and no matter whether it is imposed incrementally or all at once.
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Right, but the flip side of that is that that argument has reached such a level of absurdity that we're now not even allowed to call people who literally support the very definition of fascism, fascists.
There's nothing wrong with calling people whose political views align with fascism fascists. It's created this absurd situation where liberal is being turned into a dirty word even though liberalism is the very ideology of liberty on which the modern Western world was founded, that is the basis of American i
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Johnathan Haidt has done good work on the psychology of political persuasion. He's a self-described liberal who discovered some of the personality traits that correlate with political belief. One of the most telling discoveries was that conservatives tend to be curious about what liberals think and why, while liberals see conservatives as inferior "other," inherently incapable of thought. [archive.is]
This is a dangerous pathological form of thinking. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls it one of the 3 great untruths, "Th
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I say this as one much closer to the political right than many so-called "right-wing extremists."
But, kudos, for standing up for honesty and integrity, and for recognizing that genuine extremism on any side tends to fuel extremism on the others.
I wish there were more like you on all sides, including my own.
Professional rage farmers? (Score:2)
So don't propagate their Subjects. It doesn't help and may even hurt. Depends on how they are paid.
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Do you realize you just invented something in your own mind, assigned it to the right, and then proceeded to harshly criticize the right for what you made up?
Do leftists have any self-awareness of what they're doing when they do this? It happens all the time. I blame censorship. Being deprived of actual right voices, leftists are retreating into fantasy. It could be actual mental illness. Pew's March 2020 COVID-19 survey states white (and especially 'very') liberals are far more likely than all other i [twitter.com]
Plea deals (Score:3)
Originally the system had checks and balances with the judges being able to invalidate overcharging at sentencing time but with mand
Re:Plea deals (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with the quota is that by the time they get to the 4th acquittal, they will use their connections to lie cheat and steal as much as necessary to secure the next conviction without regard for actual guilt. We already have problems with some prosecutors hiding exculpatory evidence or even fabricating evidence.
Step one, the mandatory minimum sentence for prosecutors hiding or fabricating evidence shall be the maximum the defendant faced.
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Indeed. Perverted incentives. And prosecutors tend to not be the most savory individuals in the first place. Authoritarians like to try for these positions and these people have no restraint.
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Editorial stupidity.
It's sad that a mentally ill person took his life.
It is sad that he committed serious crimes thinking he was just engaging in minor mischief.
Most likely the he would have been found guilty and received a light sentence due to the lack of damage, and the apparent lack of intent to cause damage.
But that doesn't imply that he shouldn't have been prosecuted, or that suicide is the fault of whoever you blame in your suicide letter. Suicide is dysfunction, and the causal factors are usually in
Enslave and Torture for Great Justice (Score:1, Troll)
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-- Justice Louis Brandeis
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-- Justice Clarence Thomas
Re: Enslave and Torture for Great Justice (Score:1)
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Whatever, he attacked the Boston Children’s Hospital because he thought some girl had been mistreated. So endangering others was okay as long as he got whatever floats his boat. The man is beyond creepy.
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Yeah. It's only certain kinds of vigilantes that are celebrated in the US.
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Where "cross a line" and "become creepy" are probably opinions. Your morale on this may vary.
Putting more than zero people at risk for [insert noble cause here], imho, is crossing a line, because then you decide some causes are more worthwhile for people's lives than other people's lives. Which is not up for you to decide.
And that is fucking creepy.
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There are few comments I find I am highly sympathetic with the sentiment and yet know are logically wrong. This comment just needs a bit of logic testing to see what I mean.
Consider "Putting more than zero people at risk to stop a [mass murderer], imho, is crossing a line, because then you decide some causes are more worthwhile for people's lives than other people's lives." You would stop all assassination because of the risk. You would never intentionally cause regime change. You would just let Germany or
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Whatever, he attacked [...]
Punitive torture is always utterly unjustified.
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Not to say any torture is justified, but in this instance it's being used for punishment.
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it's being used for punishment
Not sure if it's even that. Gottesfeld may have some associates on the outside that he can convince and support to carry out further attacks.
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He attacked their external servers, not medical systems or even internal administrative systems. Nobody was endangered.
BTW, the girl (then a minor) was being held in the psych ward with limited and monitored communication with her family. According to an article published in 2020, after she was returned to her family (by court order) and given treatment for the mitochondrial disease she was diagnosed with at Tufts, she was doing better.
So it was a bit more than him just thinking some girl was mistreated.
Hon
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as long as he got whatever floats his boat
Sounds like that boat-floating thing didn't work out so well.
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Too bad for your narrative 85% of those charged are at their homes on pretrial release and only a small percent of those are actually in solitary. Rates for both are lower for Jan 6 defendants than national averages. The Jan 6th defendants and their whiners are the embodiment of “When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
I support bail reform/abolition and ending solitary confinement for everyone, Jan 6 included. Do you?
rescued by at sea by a Disney (Score:1)
And USA readers... (Score:1)
...kept silence about this news and the only posts here are terrible jokes because of fear of... CMU?
Re: And USA readers... (Score:3, Insightful)
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There is absolutely nothing that can justify the existence of CMUs in the first place, so there's not a lot of need to investigate the individual case.
However, it does kind of seem like the particular reason he's in the CMU in the first place is not that his communicating with anybody would create even the kind of "risk" that was originally used to justify the idea, but that he said things that embarassed the Bureau of Prisons. That's kind of icing on the cake.
Re: And USA readers... (Score:1)
Still, whatâ(TM)s the justification to holding him in solitary for 5 months?
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There is no news. There is a narrative that is impossible to verify, and that isn't even very self-consistent.
Was he in solitary while he was being transferred? Was he awaiting transport, and refusing to cooperate? Was his lawyer preventing his transfer? Was he in protective isolation because of threats to his safety? Being in solitary confinement is often not punitive, and if you're well adjusted, can be a much better way to pass the time than in the general population of a prison. Prisons are not nice pla
Improper use of CMU. (Score:5, Interesting)
For his crime of DDoSing Boston Children's Hospital's website down during an online donation drive, authorities seem to have labeled him as a domestic terrorist, despite being charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
https://www.federalregister.go... [federalregister.gov]
CMUs are designed to provide an inmate housing unit environment that enables staff monitoring of all communications between inmates in a Communications Management Unit (CMU) and persons in the community. The ability to monitor such communication is necessary to ensure the safety, security, and orderly operation of correctional facilities, and protection of the public. These regulations represent a “floor” beneath which communications cannot be further restricted.
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Instead, an important category of inmates that might be designated to a CMU is inmates whose current offense(s) of conviction, or offense conduct, included association, communication, or involvement, related to international or domestic terrorism. Past behaviors of terrorist inmates provide sufficient grounds to suggest a substantial risk that they may inspire or incite terrorist-related activity, especially if ideas for or plans to incite terrorist-related activity are communicated to groups willing to engage in or to provide equipment or logistics to facilitate terrorist-related activity. The potential ramifications of this activity outweigh the inmate's interest in unlimited communication with persons in the community.
Communication related to terrorist-related activity can occur in codes that are difficult to detect and extremely time-consuming to interpret. Inmates involved in such communication, and other persons involved or linked to terrorist-related activities, take on an exalted status with other like-minded individuals. Their communications acquire a special level of inspirational significance for those who are already predisposed to these views, causing a substantial risk that such recipients of their communications will be incited to unlawful terrorist-related activity.
This guy is no saint and this article is bias but lumping him in with ideologically driven terrorists is beyond improper, it's retaliatory.
Re:Improper use of CMU. (Score:4, Interesting)
He launched a cyberattack on a children's hospital. Now he thought he was being a hero when he did it because, of stuff he read on the Internet, but that's not much of an excuse.
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My understanding is that he didn't actually DDoS the hospital itself, just the website for it which was having a fundraiser. Nobody was in danger due to his actions.
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Even if that was all he did, it's still a crime, and there's punishment. Here's the thing about civil disobedience: the punishment is what makes it an effective political tactic. The public has to be so enraged at the motivations of the crime that the punishment is perceived as an outrage.
It follows that it's really, really stupid to make an example of a prisoner jailed for a politically motivated crime. That's not why I'm against it; I'm against making examples of anyone because that's use of law for *po
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to make an example of a prisoner jailed for a politically motivated crime
There is no detailed information about the situation. You have no idea, and are defaulting to being credulous of ridiculous and bombastic accusations that are rather low on the list of probably causes for whatever the situation actually is.
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You may not know this, but those fundraisers pay for actual care provided to patients, and if they had more money, they could care for more patients.
He could have killed somebody.
Definitely a terrorist.
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That's pure speculation. Also, by that measure, everyone driving a car that pollutes is a murderer. Are you a murderer?
Yeah I was about to post that (Score:3)
Fuck that guy.
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He attacked their website. You are trying to make it sound like he locked up medical records or something. He did not.
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Who said he was a good guy? The issue is that he's being treated differently from other scumbags. Check out what a CMU does -- very few people if any should be in them.
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He was a hero.
What you left out was that Boston Children's Hospital (let's name names here) was literally killing a patient
According to what you and he read on the Internet.
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According to what you and he read on the Internet.
As opposed to your detailed first person knowledge of his attack on their website?
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I think the court documents are a more reliable source than some rando's speculations.
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There are also court documents relating to orders that the girl be released from the mental ward and returned to her parents. Further, there are reasonably trusted news sources.
Re:Improper use of CMU. (Score:5, Interesting)
CMUs are designed to provide an inmate housing unit environment that enables staff monitoring of all communications between inmates in a Communications Management Unit (CMU) and persons in the community. The ability to monitor such communication is necessary to ensure the safety, security, and orderly operation of correctional facilities, and protection of the public. These regulations represent a “floor” beneath which communications cannot be further restricted.
The purpose of CMUs, kind of like "Supermax", is primarily punitive and not public-safety oriented.
The "Supermax" at ADX Florence does not exist because there's a real threat that the people housed there might bust out of, say, USP Allenwood by having confederates make an El Chapo tunnel into the shower room. Nor does it exist to house "high level gang leaders," most of those are housed in general population units, with the agreement that they will keep their gangs in line and limit the potential for violence against staff or headline-grabbing riots.
There are a few people there because they have a chronic pattern of attacking staff, but the number is far too small to justify the facility. ADX exists as a dumping ground for people with serious mental illnesses (since tripling their custody costs is apparently still more cost-efficient than treating them) and a place to stash "troublemakers" who do or say things that the Bureau of Prisons dislikes, and so the American government can make a statement about what a horrible person this is, he's so bad we had to put him in Supermax. Supermax is such a hot commodity that they wanted to buy a huge empty prison in Illinois and make it another Supermax -- that plan eventually mostly failed and it's just a Regular Max now, possibly in part because Congress said they couldn't use part of it as a stateside GTMO.
ADX Florence is 100% solitary confinement, 23/7, with the option to go in an outdoor cage at a time of staff's choosing with possibly one or two other inmates and walk around in circles. And then some nutcase in an adjacent cage might throw liquefied shit on you. Visitation is essentially non-existent, it's all non-contact through glass or by videophone, it's infrequent, and the staff will often arbitrarily reject visitors because they "test positive for marijuana" with an ion track spectrometer that's not used properly and despite the fact that marijuana is legal in Colorado and the whole state is contaminated with it and also the fact that visits are non-contact and there's no way a visitor could pass contraband to an inmate.
The structure of the facility, and pictures of the accommodations, are all pretty clearly visible on Google Maps for anyone curious.
The CMU is sort of an ADX-Lite, there's a bit more socialization (unless you get put in solitary like this guy) but the primary function is to make "communication" of any sort with the outside world enough of a pain in the ass that people can't or won't do it. The ostensible purpose is, as the federal regulation says, to limit terrorists' ability to incite followers to acts of violence. The actual usage of the CMU is almost completely punitive, it's a control tool -- behave yourself or we will take away your ability to communicate and visit with your family and friends.
There might be some room to argue that these penalties are or are not acceptable as a tool of control for people convicted of a crime. That's not the point here. The point is, the tools are not being used to achieve the ends for which they were legally established, and the USA is supposed to be a nation where things work according to the law. And the inmate in question in this thread may or may not be a shitbag, there's room for that argument, but in a nation that supposedly champions rule of law, whether or not a person is a shitbag should not determine how the State treats that person vs. any other person convicted of a crime.
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You need to learn to cut down your rants to concise points. Nobody is reading your long-winded and meandering posts, myself included.
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You need to learn to cut down your rants to concise points. Nobody is reading your long-winded and meandering posts, myself included.
One problem with modern society and the reason there's so little understanding of the bullshit that goes on, is that every issue is meant to be addressed in a Tweet.
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Not every problem needs you to present exposition when hyperlinks can do the same for the uninformed. Not every problem needs hypotheticals on possible realities. Not every problem needs a multiple paragraph rant about the state of things. All in all, it would likely require about three, maybe four sentences to express the same things you write in your novella posts.
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Nobody is reading your long-winded and meandering posts, myself included.
I read it. Go brag about your laziness elsewhere.
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Did someone puts in your coffee this morning? You seem to have a lot of undirected anger.
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I read the whole thing and was informed.
The USA is a hypocritical serial abuser of human rights.
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I read the whole thing and was informed.
LOL No, you read some hyperbole and were credulous. Being credulous is not the same as being informed.
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You need to shut the fuck up and stop trying to shout down people who put effort into their posts. The fact that your short attention span makes you feel inferior is entirely your own problem.
Now go take your fucking Ritalin.
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"Retaliatory" is a near-universal feature of prison systems. With no other data, it would be my first hypothesis.
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For his crime of DDoSing Boston Children's Hospital's website down during an online donation drive
Sounds like a terrorist to me!
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Not really improper use. He had not only launched a DDoS attack, but (attempted to) recruit others to support his cause. One of the reasons that people are sentenced to prison is to separate them from victims and the resources they use to commit further crimes. Since his activities consist largely of communications of various sorts, this is exactly the facility he should be placed in.
Vote in your primary election (Score:1)
The problem is primary elections are a primarily the domain of older more politically engaged voters who tend to be
Prosecutorial overreaching, but (Score:1, Troll)
I wish that US prosecutors didn’t use the “throw everything at them and see what sticks” approach. But these people aren’t exactly shiny heroes. Generally they wind up in prosecutors sights because they pulle
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Terrorists who attack children's hospitals should have the book thrown at them. Maybe two books, just in case they win something on appeal.
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Ahh - the comedy of the LOLbertarians.
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you are in the laughing phase, fascist.
Due process and human rights? (Score:2)
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That's the smell of your own assumptions and prejudices, since there is no actual information about the situation available.
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Hacktivist my A#$? this loser launched a (Score:2, Insightful)
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Perhaps, but not deserving cruel and unusual punishment.
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Re:Hacktivist my A#$? this loser launched a (Score:5, Informative)
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There is no difference; they use the funding to treat children and successfully reducing their funding would cause children not to get treatment. Often these are last-chance sort of treatments that won't be provided without funding, but are sometimes successful.