Weev. Photo: Gawker
Adrian Chen at Gawker has a must-read profile on Weev: so-called “iPad hacker,” founder of the anti-blogging Internet-trolling organization “Gay Nigger Association of America,” and born-again Mormon troll. Snip:
For Auernheimer, the AT&T breach was one of his finest works as a troll. He personally didn’t hack anything—the program used to collect the email addresses was written by Spitler—except the media. He was the hype man for Goatse, and he claims blew the breach up far beyond its actual significance. “The bug that I’m indicted over isn’t a big deal,” he says. “What made it big is the way I presented it.” He boils down his success at promoting the AT&T job to three bullet points: “Rhetoric, persuasion, and meme reference.”
But was collecting the email addresses actually a crime? “If somebody mistakenly puts information out there on the web and somebody mistakenly gets that information, that’s not illegal,” says Jennifer Granick, a lawyer and the director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford. This is why Auernheimer decided to fight his charges instead of take a plea deal, as Spitler did last year.
“I contend there is no crime in telling the truth or using AT&T’s, or anybody’s, publicly accessible data, to cite it to talk about how they made people’s data public,” he told CNET.
Auernhemier’s jury disagreed.
Read: The Internet’s Best Terrible Person Goes to Jail: Can a Reviled Master Troll Become a Geek Hero?.