iPad Hacker Appeals With Cyber Law Expert as New Lawyer
By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Mashable
The infamous iPad hacker will get another day in court, and this time, he’ll have a dream team of lawyers to defend him.
Andrew Auernheimer, also known as Weev, was sentenced to 41 months in prison on Monday for computer crimes. In a blog post on Thursday, Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and an expert in computer crime law, announced he was joining his defense team pro bono and he also confirmed that they had filed a notice of appeal (PDF), the initial step in the appeal process.
Kerr joins Auernheimer’s trial lawyer Tor Ekeland, and two attorneys from the Internet civil rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Marcia Hofmann and Hanni Fakhoury. The two announced they were joining the case on Monday.
In the blog post, Kerr underlined why he decided to work for free to defend Auernheimer in front of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He said that he thinks the case will “set a major precedent on the meaning of unauthorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.”
The law, which was used against Auernheimer, was the same one levied against Aaron Swartz and, more recently, Matthew Keys. The legislation, approved in 1986 and subsequently amended and expanded (as perfectly explained in this exhaustive story from CNET’s Declan McCullagh), has been criticized for being overly broad and for giving prosecutors too much leeway, criminalizing what critics define as innocuous acts.
For Kerr, Auernheimer’s case is a perfect example of that.
“What Auernheimer and Spitler did was lawful authorized access, not unlawful unauthorized access,” he wrote referring to the actions that brought Auernheimer to justice. In 2010, the hacker and his colleague Daniel Spitler discovered that they could acces an AT&T webserver by simply changing a number in its URL. That way, and with the help of a script, they gained access to around 114,000 email addressess of AT&T subscribers who owned iPads.
The prosecutors and the judge considered this to be unauthorized access. Kerr disagrees. “I think that’s wrong. At bottom, the conduct here was visiting a public website,” he wrote. What’s more, Kerr doesn’t get why the sentence considers this a crime and not a simple misdemeanor. Kerr explains that the CFAA considers unauthorized access as a misdemeanor offense, but similar computer crime state laws consider it a felony. And that’s why the government considered Auernheimer’s actions a felony.
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