Fired AOL Engineer gets 15 Months

n3hat writes "A former America Online software engineer was sentenced to 15 months in prison for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers who sent out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mail messages, according to this A.P. story in the Baltimore Sun."

Lucky guy

[igny]

He has got just 1 second of jail per 175 emails.

Lemme get this straight

[DSP_Geek]

Kevin Mitnick prowls around some machines, steals nothing, damages nothing, yet spends four years in jail waiting for his trial, gets a five year sentence, and has to stay away from computers for another few years, while this fucknuts steals a subscriber list for spammers and gets a slap on the wrist? Doesn't even have to stay away from other people's mail servers? Riiight.

Just curious

[hackstraw]

Does anybody actually know the charge he was convicted of? I looked at the article and it mentioned pleas and taking "stolen property" across state lines, and CAN-SPAM, but none of these were clear as to what he was actually convicted of.

Anybody?

Re:In a related story...

[`Sean]

June 22, 2000 (from http://www.inertramblings.com/archives/000439.html [inertramblings.com]):

America Online: A sucker born every minute...

According to a corporate press release dated June 16, 2000, America Online has surpassed the 23 million member mark. Founded in 1985, AOL has been a household name to novice computer users worldwide. Unfortunately, many of these novices don't know that they're only seeing a small portion of the Internet and are being limited by AOL's proprietary and archaic interface.

Now, it's fairly safe to make the assumption that at least a quarter of AOL's 23 million customers are simply short-term users along for the free trial or jumping from service to service looking for the best deal. And, using that same line of thinking, roughly half of those 17.25 million remaining customers are probably smart enough to see AOL for what it really is and cancel their service in a desperate fit of fight or flight.

That leaves approximately 8.63 million customers that use AOL as their primary Internet Service Provider, give or take a random three quarter million people at any given time signing up or canceling. With this in mind, and approximately 7.88 million minutes in AOL's 15 year history, this proves that a sucker really is born every minute.

Oh come on...

[Anonymous Coward]

what's the point in selling 92 million email address? any dictionary attack worth it's weight will have found 80%+ of those accounts anyway... with 92 million of these suckers, any <random_string_of_characters> @ aol.com will almost certainly come up with a match, or at least a partial match.

Re:Why jail?

[Eightyford]

Right, but what if he has to give up all of his money? Sounds fair to me.

15 months is all he got?!? Opinion folks - fair?

[ACK!!]

I mean he stole a ton of personal info and stuff.

There are a lot of hardcore hackers that got a ton more time than that.

Tell me what you think?

bfd

[ErichTheWebGuy]

From what I understand, there are several robot programs that go through AOL chat rooms and suck down screen names for use in spam operations. I would suspect that that technique is:

- more effective, since all of the addresses you gather are known good
- cheaper, since you can get millions of addresses a week then cancel your free trial
- less risky

A spammer that pays that kind of money for such a seemingly worthless list of stolen addresses should look for another line of work.

Re:Why jail?

[value_added]

just don't let the guy declare bankruptcy (another thing I've never really understood)

Such debts can't be discharged in bankruptcy court.

Re:Why jail?

[JohnsonWax]

Repayment would be a deterrent if it were proportional to the crime. It's part of the reason why RICO provides for 2x damages. If you made $10M as a spammer and had to repay $20M, even successful criminals would be deterred.

I work hard and don't mind paying taxes for the benefits I receive, but money earned in the conviction of a crime should be returned to those it came from *and* an equal sum paid to the taxpayers for having to put up with the assholes in the first place.

I sure wouldn't mind if Ebbers and Co. could be compelled to put $11B into the local, state, and federal coffers. If they can't pay up, I'm sure there are some boys in Fallujah who wouldn't mind giving up their place for a fellow citizen who needs a good way to repay their debt to society.

Re:Lucky guy

[ScentCone]

He has got just 1 second of jail per 175 emails

That assumes that the people he sold the names to (and whoever else might have received them downstream) only used them once. I'm going to bet that's not the case. Some hunk of that last has probably made rounds to multiple mail whores for a little merge/purge processing against their other lists. That's not nearly enough time - he should get out when people holding those addresses haven't seen any spam for at least 6 months.

Re:Please don't call him an "engineer"

[pyrrhonist]

Yeah, and those aren't engineering degrees. So they shouldn't be calling themselves engineers.

What makes it not an engineering degree?

I have a BSCS from an engineering school. At an engineering school, the curriculum is basically the same for all students up to junior year. For instance, I took the same science and math courses as the rest of the engineering students. I had to take the same number of science courses as the EEs, and more math courses than the EEs. Some of the more advanced courses are also the same for CS as they are for EE, so some of the courses I took were also EE courses and taught by EE professors. I was, of course, required to take a course in software engineering. In addition, I also had to take a course on the social implications of software engineering, which is something the other engineering disciplines did not have a course comparable to.

So why is my degree not an engineering degree?

I still don't call myself an engineer. Back off man, I'm a scientist.

Re:15 months is all he got?!? Opinion folks - fair

[MrResistor]

He plead guilty and expressed believable remorse for his actions. That's the whole difference. Like it or not, that's how our system works.

Re:Please don't call him an "engineer"

[Tim C]

And most of the people with titles like "software engineer" put just as much time, effort, and money into getting their computer science degrees.

And I put just as much time, effort and money into getting my physics degree, but that doesn't make me an engineer. I have friends who similarly invested in their arts degrees - would you call them engineers?

Re:Lucky guy

[plaxion]

It would have been nice if he had gotten 1 second for every email. That wouldn't landed him roughly 3 years (2.917). Then the judge could've said to him "You've earned every second of your term".

Re:Ahh....

[Fatalis]

http://dis.4chan.org/read.php/dis/1124400519/1-40 [4chan.org]

Make him apologize

[flakac]

Actually, a better alternative would be to sentence him to sending apologies to all of the people whose addresses he stole.

By hand. One at a time.

If courts started making spammers do this instead, it'd be a much better deterrent than jail, and it would much better fit the crime.

Re:Hypothetical Prison Conversation

[bladernr]

You never know about people's motives in harmless crimes like this.

So he was poor. The crime was harmess. The others involved have better attorneys.. He needed the money. You paint a very sympathetic picture.

However, for any society to live under the rule of law, its citizens do not get to select which laws they obey, and which their circumstances mean don't apply.

My first job out of school in 1993 paid $25k ($32k today, considering inflation), and I had student loans, rent, a car note, insurance, etc. I got by, without resorting to credit cards, and even managed to save a very small amount as a cushion. I didn't think it was within my rights to improve my situation by illegal means, but I guess if guys like you were in power, I could have just robbed the local bank and said "hey, I'm poor and need the money" if caught.

Re:In a related story...

[Ubergrendle]

Our uber-geek superiority complex sidesteps the fact that probably a large number of people in the world still have "12:00" flashing on their VHS (Beta?) VCRs, they never upgrade or patch the operating system their computer ships with, and still think that a 486 is a good computer.

AOL targets the masses; they fill a niche that allow us geeks to play Battlefield 2 or compile code or peruse usenet, without having to answer a phone every 2 minutes explaining how to use "electronic mail...no you don't have to print it to read it, so yes you're right its not really like mail."

AOL also did something cool recently with regards to Live8 -- live streaming of the event, and high-bitrate streams of each city's concerts archive online. Give credit where its due...

PS Note I would rather peel off my fingernails one by one and douse them in hot sauce rather than use AOL on a daily basis, but that's just me.

Re:Why jail?

[hackstraw]

there is very little else that can serve as a deterrent.

Let me think...

Beheading. Public humiliation (stockades, or something similar). A tattoo on the forehead. Deportation. Loss of driver's license. An intense chemical or physical sensory overload such as being confined with a horrible smell or intense low frequency sound that is nauseating. Flogging.

No, I'm not a sadist, but I did come up with all of these off the top of my head.

Jail and prison are the adult version of being sent to your room when you were a child. The unfortunate thing is that unlike when you were a child, there are others with you.

Actually, besides beheading and the intense sensory thing, all of the other techniques are used in raising children all the time. I don't understand the insistence on incarceration for any legal infraction. Especially when one looks at the data and realizes that it does little to modify the behavior of the person.