Former Student Gets Year In Prison For College President Election Fraud 274
Gunkerty Jeb writes, quoting Threatpost: "A former Cal State San Marcos student was sentenced to a year in prison this week for election tampering by using keystroke loggers to grab student credentials and then vote for himself. Matthew Weaver, 22, of Huntington Beach, Calif., stole almost 750 students' identities to try and become president of the San Diego County college's student government. His plan went awry when the school's computer technicians noticed an anomaly in activity and caught Weaver with keystroke loggers as he sat in front of the suspicious computer."
Settings examples (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Job Offer (Score:2, Insightful)
Unlikely, they want the ones who don't get cought
If only (Score:5, Insightful)
If only they would take the real elections half as seriously, maybe then we'd regain a (small) measure of confidence in the election process.
Re:Settings examples (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone steals my credentials, I'd expect that kind of punishment. I don't think he's being made an example, he's actually getting off light.
There's a lot of other things that he could potentially do, or has exposed those students to by capturing their passwords. It's not that he was caught trying to rig an election, it's that he was impersonating other individuals, stealing their identities.
Re:This guy has got a bright future ahead of him (Score:3, Insightful)
Dems are neither intelligent nor ballsy enough for this sort of thing.
Re:This guy has got a bright future ahead of him (Score:5, Insightful)
Diebold.
Re:This guy has got a bright future ahead of him (Score:3, Insightful)
The Dems. Duh
Re:Ah, no... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that he rigged an election, it's that he stole and impersonated many students identities.
Re:Ah, no... (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter where he did this, he stole people's credentials (illegally), and used it to access system (illegally).
CFAA [wikipedia.org] is a federal statute, so he broke federal law -- and therefore gets federal prison.
I have no sympathy for him. None at all.
Re:Stealing Identities (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Read the full article. This is NOT harmless. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Job Offer (Score:5, Insightful)
They want the ones with no sense of ethics or morality.
Actually, they probably want ones with a strong sense of ethics that can be bent in a direction of their choosing. You don't get nearly as hard work out of someone ethically unmoored as you do out of someone who is acting for a "greater good," and you get even more work out of someone who doesn't even see the lesser evil. Worse for the former, you may get junk data since they don't care enough.
No, no greater evil is committed than by those who believe they are doing a great good. There are plenty of people in this country that passionately believe the principle that only those who do wrong have something to hide and that privacy is nothing but a shield for criminals. That's a form of strong ethics, though it's one I'd disagree with.
Hire those people, and you're golden.
Re:Ah, no... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or do you believe somebody putting a keylogger trojan on your computer should be legal?
Just because someone thinks the punishment is excessive, doesn't mean they think that the crime should be legal.
Likewise, just because someone thinks the punishment was excessive in one scenario, doesn't mean they'd think it excessive in other scenarios. You wouldn't punish someone for stealing a snickers bar as harshly as you would if they'd stolen an iPad, would you?