A team of computer-crime experts filed an appeal to free a man convicted for hacking AT&T’s website to get the names and email addresses of 114,000 iPad 3G accounts in 2011.
Andrew Auernheimer, known as "weev," was convicted after a five-day trial in November 2011 for hacking AT&T’s server. He was convicted imprisonment for up to 41 months.
George Washington University Law professor Orin Kerr, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and Weev’s lawyers joined together to file the appeal in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. They appealed to have Weev freed because the decision made by the New Jersey federal court misused the theory of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (CFAA).
Weev and his co-defendant Daniel Spitler stumbled upon the weakness of AT&T’s server in 2010. They accidentally found out that the servers were configured to make the email addresses of the iPad users publicly available. They pulled all these email addresses and distributed it to various media organizations to prove the security flaw of AT&T’s server along with a call to have the company fix this security issue.
"This case is about the freedom to surf the Internet," said Kerr in a statement posted in EFF’s website. "Congress never intended to criminalize visiting a public website."
Despite their good intentions, Weev and Spitler were charged with identity theft and a violation under the provision of CFAA. Spitler pled guilty while Weev tried to battle the charges but lost it in the trial.
Weev is currently detained in a Special Housing Unit at the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex in White Deer, Penn. while Spitler is not yet sentenced. This showed an obvious bias on the ruling of the court.
Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Jim Sensenbrenner, and Sen. Ron Wyden presented "Aaron's Law" in Congress last June 20 which is aimed to amend CFAA.
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