> Weev needs to be in prison for attempting to blackmail and extort a company over private consumer information.
Can you back that up? I thought that Weev joked with friends about doing that but never took it anywhere or did anything that I would regard even as "attempting" to blackmail or extort instead just told Gawker.
Would be interested if there is something but in the absence of further information my view is that all these charges should probably be dropped.
Edit: From what I've read he isn't a good guy and there may have been a case to charge him on unrelated matter (stalking/harassment) but he should still go free on this stuff.
> Can you back that up? I thought that Weev joked with friends about doing that but never took it anywhere or did anything that I would regard even as "attempting" to blackmail or extort instead just told Gawker.
There are words on an IRC transcript. Whether those words constitute a "joke" is a matter of interpretation, and that's something we leave up to juries. For various practical reasons, we do not just trust criminal defendants when they say they are "joking." Weev's jury, which returned a verdict after just a few hours, apparently did not think he was joking.
At the end of the day, this is the sort of thing that got Weev convicted, not some "corrupt prosecutor." If you do something at the edge of the law, and do it in a way where a jury of your peers is likely to find you unsympathetic or not understand what you did, you're going to have a bad time. Maybe this isn't fair, but it's a natural property of criminal law systems based on jury trials. The law isn't enforced by robots, it's enforced by people, and if people don't like you, that diminishes your odds.
Whether a joke or a real suggestion there seems to be nothing suggesting it was taken forwards and it isn't like they didn't get chance to go through with something because the police knocked down the door that minute.
Without further evidence of any concrete action I don't see how it could be regarded as an "attempt" at anything. That he was convicted on the basis of that[0] strikes me as a failure of the system (including the prosecutor, the court and the jury) and that hopefully an appeals court would correct the error.
[0] Assuming that was the extent of the evidence in this aspect as there may be other evidence of which I am not aware.
No, I can't back it up offhand (nor do I care to go to the trouble). I'm more pointing out that I wish the case would have been of that nature (because it was definitely discussed to some degree, threatening, releasing to gawker, etc) and not on the trumped up "hacking" charges.
No problem, I am genuinely interested if there is more to the blackmail allegation than the snippet of IRC logs discussing it. Obviously it was released to Gawker but I hadn't seen anything indicating a threat of any kind was actually made and the release to Gawker appears to me specifically NOT making a blackmail attempt (assuming no such threat was actually made).
Unfortunately, they put Weev into prison for hacking under CFAA, which on those charges, I agree - He needs to walk because they're utterly bogus.