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So let me get this straight, the guy hacked into his neighbour's WiFi and used it to mess with their MySpace page, e-mail coworkers, post a picture of 'pubescen

by inoop 15y ago

So let me get this straight, the guy hacked into his neighbour's WiFi and used it to mess with their MySpace page, e-mail coworkers, post a picture of 'pubescent girl having sex with two young boys' (I'd have gone for tubgirl, but okay), and threaten Joe Biden. And this gets him eighteen years in prison? In most countries you get eighteen years for murder. I'm sure the guy is a creepy douche, and what he did is clearly wrong, but these look like trumped up charges by a law firm that knows how to play ball. No-one will come out in defense of this man now that he has been publicly labeled a pedophile, even though I see no evidence of that in the article. If he really were into children, would they not have found a stash of pictures or videos when their confiscated his machine? Instead they found only the one he posted to myspace. I'm not sure how young the girl in the picture really was, but anyone looking to shock can easily get such material from say, 4chan. So really what we have here is a cracked WEP key, some e-mail harassment, a picture of a young girl having sex, and a death-threat to Joe Biden. Because of this, and probably because he tried to fuck with a lawyer, his life is now essentially over and young children get to spend the rest of their youths without a father. Am I the only one who thinks this is a bit excessive? Also, you're living in a pretty fucked up society when your neighbours call the cops because they saw you kissing your kid 'on the lips'. I'm pretty sure my entire family is a bunch of pedophiles by those standards. edit: totally got the wording wrong from the article. The guy kissed their boy, not his own. Mea culpa, must learn to read.

pnathan 15y ago
from the article, it was the hacker kissing the kid on the lips, not the family...
- inoop 15y ago
  Yes, and I'm saying that that does not make him a pedophile. I see fathers kissing their young kids on the lips all the time, maybe it's a European thing? Unless he's using tongue I don't see a reason to call the cops.
  - malbs 15y ago
    So you'd be fine with a complete stranger kissing your child on the lips?
    - baltcode 15y ago
      No, you don't have to be ok with it. I'd just not hang around someone like that. Calling the cops seems excessive.
    - inoop 15y ago
      Like I noted in my original post, I read the article wrong and thought the guy kissed his own son rather than the family's. So my bad on that one. As to your question, I guess it depends on the person. I wouldn't mind if it was a women for example. If it's a guy, I'd at least go have a chat with him. If I wasn't happy with the situation I'd ask him not to kiss my boy like that or tell my kid to avoid him. I'd certainly not assume he's a child molester right off the bat and call the cops.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        By having a chat and asking an adult not to molest your children, you are very likely offering a pedophile a free crack at someone else's less well-attended kid. In reality, people who molest children are deeply sick, almost certainly not restricting their attention to your children, very likely have accosted victims before this one, and will very likely go on to commit further offenses. If one of my neighbors saw something like this happen and let it slide, I'd be absolutely furious with them.
        sliverstorm 15y ago
        Though I've never faced the situation myself, I know litigation is expensive, and your own family comes first. I can't say for sure that I'd leap at the opportunity to go to court.
      - sliverstorm 15y ago
        I wouldn't mind if it was a women for example. If it's a guy, I'd at least go have a chat with him What a world we live in. Not that I disagree with you, but what a world.
SeoxyS 15y ago
I think the sentencing is completely fair. It's not really about the cracking or emailing threats or any of that. It's about emotional torture. Yes, that's a thing, and it's a serious offense. I can't think of a more traumatic experience for a family than what the victims went through. Somebody who plans and executes psychological torture on his neighbor for months should spend the rest of his days under some kind of watch. Now, it's debatable whether prison or a mental health institution is the correct choice here… but that's besides the point. Fact is, he had some seriously psychopathic tendencies, and society is much better off with him off its streets.
- inoop 15y ago
  While I agree that emotional torture is a terrible thing. Still, do you think eighteen years is really fair? Now you claim the guy has psychopathic tendencies. I won't argue for or against this because I'm not a psychologist. But even if he does, this can never be a reason to lock him up. In western society, people are punished for crimes they commit, not for having a certain psychological profile.
  - ars 15y ago
    Personally I think it's too short. Intent matters a lot, this person did not just do criminal activity for his own benefit. No, he did criminal activity in order to make someone else as miserable as possible. This is a special level of heinous and deserves a much more severe sentence.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      Seems to expose some different assumptions about the purpose of jail time. To me, it's purely protective: you put violent people in jail to physically incapacitate them until the threat of them causing more violence diminishes as they age. That's the reason most Scandinavian countries give sentences of under 10 years for most crimes, and under 20 years even for murder, because the risk of older people committing violent crimes is very low. So if your goal is to protect society from reoffense, the biggest win is to keep people locked up for their 20s; the 2nd-biggest is people in their 30s; and it gets increasingly pointless beyond that. In fact, giving supervised release instead of jailtime is often warranted, because keeping people tied to their communities / sources of employment is one of the best ways to prevent recidivism, while a few years in jail tends to turn people into hardened criminals (with fewer ties to the non-criminal world, and more ties to criminal gangs). In this case, 18 years seems pretty clearly excessive from a protective point of view; it's not even clear any jail time at all is warranted, since some sort of probation with supervision of internet use would likely suffice to prevent him from reoffending. My impression is that many people, especially in the U.S., have a notion of justice that's either more retributive or deterrent based, though. If retributive, that's a pure ethical disagreement. If deterrent, then we might have an empirical disagreement, about which lengths of sentences in fact deter crimes.
jacques_chester 15y ago
The sentence was not handed out for a single crime, but for multiple crimes. Some of those crimes -- threat to kill -- are taken very seriously indeed. Also I imagine the judge will have taken account of the accused's pattern of behaviour and modified the sentence to reflect the fact that he is clearly a menace to society.
- inoop 15y ago
  I'm not a legal expert so please correct me if I'm wrong, but afaik the US system essentially treats individual charges as individual crimes when it comes to sentencing. Note that a lot of other legal systems don't have such clear cut 'stacking' of sentences, because there is considerable overlap between the charges they correspond to. Legal details aside, my question was more about whether it's morally right to sentence someone to eighteen years for the crimes described in the article?
  - anseljh 15y ago
    Nope, there are often sentence enhancements when there are multiple crimes involved or if the defendant has prior convictions. Very common.
  - smallblacksun 15y ago
    >Legal details aside, my question was more about whether it's morally right to sentence someone to eighteen years for the crimes described in the article? Posting child porn and death threats? Yeah, that's worth 18 years.
    - inoop 15y ago
      You're oversimplifying. 'Posting child porn' for example turns out to be 'posting a single picture of a pubescent girl having sex with two young boys'. Note that we have not seen the picture, so the girls' age can be anywhere between 10-17 (age range according to Wikipedia article on puberty). Note also that this picture was selected for shock value, and no other child pornography was reported found on the guys' computer. The death threat was to a prominent politician who probably gets such emails on an hourly basis by cooks from all around the country. So basically what you're saying is that eighteen years is appropriate punishment for being a 4chan troll?
maratd 15y ago
> And this gets him eighteen years in prison? In most countries you get eighteen years for murder. I imagine things work the same way all over the world. The prosecutor files every charge imaginable and then requests maximum time during the sentencing hearing. That's his job. The defendant's lawyer then does his job and mitigates the damage. Now, if the defendant is stupid enough to represent himself, pleads guilty to the charges, or doesn't put up much of a fight during sentencing ... well ... you end up with this. Neither the judge nor the prosecutor have a responsibility to be nice. I have a feeling that they especially didn't have any desire to be nice considering what he did. On top of all of that, kiddie porn is a big deal here ... I'd imagine the majority of the time is for that.
- lotharbot 15y ago
  > if the defendant is stupid enough to represent himself, pleads guilty to the charges, or doesn't put up much of a fight during sentencing ... well ... you end up with this. In this case, the defendant was even stupider. He plead guilty, withdrew his plea, lied during testimony, coached witnesses, and violated the conditions of his release. See pages 22-27 of http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/07/ardolffedssentencingmemo.pdf http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/07/ardolf...
tptacek 15y ago
He was offered 2 years. He rejected it, claiming (apparently falsely!) that he was innocent of the charges. Having been caught seemingly red handed, the prosecution proceeded to throw the book at him.
- jdietrich 15y ago
  This is exhibit A in "The People vs The American Justice System". Take a plea bargain and get two years, go to trial and get eighteen. Where's the justice in that? Either people are getting away with paltry amounts of jail time for pleading guilty, or they're being punished with long sentences for using their right to a trial. A ninefold difference in sentencing goes far beyond a proportionate incentive to avoid spurious trials. Even if this defendant was abusing the court, is sixteen years a fair punishment for wasting the court's time?
  - tptacek 15y ago
    The original plea deal offering of 2 years is what I find appalling; it smacks of a prosecutor who just wants to get the case off his desk as soon as possible. Read the whole sentencing memo; the 239 month recommendation seems entirely reasonable to me. He was offered 2 years, after being caught red handed orchestrating a many-months-long criminal campaign against his neighbors in retaliation for a molestation charge he confessed to. He took it to trial instead. In the process, he violated the terms of his release from confinement. He coached family witnesses in writing to lie about the circumstances of his offense. He told the court directly that the actual victims in the case were attempting to frame him. He was given by the court an opportunity to write an "Acceptance of Responsibility" statement as a means of mitigating his sentence; in it, he told the sentencing judge that he was the victim. As a result, the prosecution wrote: At every turn, the defendant has chosen not to accept responsibility for his actions and to obstruct justice. This Court has had a firsthand opportunity to see defendant’s dangerousness, lack of remorse, and disregard for the law. A lengthy sentence is needed to prevent the defendant from engaging in any further harm. Defendant is dangerous. Defendant is remorseless. Ardolf's own actions in front of the court suggest that he's a psychopath. What judge is going to go easy on someone like that? What gets me here is, if "wifi hacking" wasn't involved, this bind to the "Your Rights Online" neuroreceptors in HN reader brains and we wouldn't be arguing it. This is a crazy person who has thankfully been removed from public circulation. Forget about the wifi stuff. Total red herring.
smazero 15y ago
But by that argument someone who carried out a sustained stalking campaign against someone might actually be guilty of just standing in places. I don't think it's necessarily the mundane details of what they actually did that should be the only determinant of the severity of their punishment. Of course this doesn't mean that an injured party should be able to claim emotional distress from any old thing.
kahawe 15y ago
You got it wrong. He did not get that sentence for hacking. He got it for this: > Barry Ardolf has demonstrated by his conduct that he is a dangerous man. When he became angry at his neighbors, he vented his anger in a bizarre and calculated campaign of terror against them. The calculated and "with intent" part and showing no remorse make it weigh so heavy; he did all that calculated and with full intent of seeing his neighbor going to prison probably for life.

by inoop 15y ago

pnathan 15y ago

from the article, it was the hacker kissing the kid on the lips, not the family...

inoop 15y ago
Yes, and I'm saying that that does not make him a pedophile. I see fathers kissing their young kids on the lips all the time, maybe it's a European thing? Unless he's using tongue I don't see a reason to call the cops.
- malbs 15y ago
  So you'd be fine with a complete stranger kissing your child on the lips?
  - baltcode 15y ago
    No, you don't have to be ok with it. I'd just not hang around someone like that. Calling the cops seems excessive.
  - inoop 15y ago
    Like I noted in my original post, I read the article wrong and thought the guy kissed his own son rather than the family's. So my bad on that one. As to your question, I guess it depends on the person. I wouldn't mind if it was a women for example. If it's a guy, I'd at least go have a chat with him. If I wasn't happy with the situation I'd ask him not to kiss my boy like that or tell my kid to avoid him. I'd certainly not assume he's a child molester right off the bat and call the cops.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      By having a chat and asking an adult not to molest your children, you are very likely offering a pedophile a free crack at someone else's less well-attended kid. In reality, people who molest children are deeply sick, almost certainly not restricting their attention to your children, very likely have accosted victims before this one, and will very likely go on to commit further offenses. If one of my neighbors saw something like this happen and let it slide, I'd be absolutely furious with them.
      - sliverstorm 15y ago
        Though I've never faced the situation myself, I know litigation is expensive, and your own family comes first. I can't say for sure that I'd leap at the opportunity to go to court.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      I wouldn't mind if it was a women for example. If it's a guy, I'd at least go have a chat with him What a world we live in. Not that I disagree with you, but what a world.

SeoxyS 15y ago

I think the sentencing is completely fair. It's not really about the cracking or emailing threats or any of that. It's about emotional torture. Yes, that's a thing, and it's a serious offense. I can't think of a more traumatic experience for a family than what the victims went through. Somebody who plans and executes psychological torture on his neighbor for months should spend the rest of his days under some kind of watch. Now, it's debatable whether prison or a mental health institution is the correct choice here… but that's besides the point. Fact is, he had some seriously psychopathic tendencies, and society is much better off with him off its streets.

inoop 15y ago
While I agree that emotional torture is a terrible thing. Still, do you think eighteen years is really fair? Now you claim the guy has psychopathic tendencies. I won't argue for or against this because I'm not a psychologist. But even if he does, this can never be a reason to lock him up. In western society, people are punished for crimes they commit, not for having a certain psychological profile.
- ars 15y ago
  Personally I think it's too short. Intent matters a lot, this person did not just do criminal activity for his own benefit. No, he did criminal activity in order to make someone else as miserable as possible. This is a special level of heinous and deserves a much more severe sentence.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Seems to expose some different assumptions about the purpose of jail time. To me, it's purely protective: you put violent people in jail to physically incapacitate them until the threat of them causing more violence diminishes as they age. That's the reason most Scandinavian countries give sentences of under 10 years for most crimes, and under 20 years even for murder, because the risk of older people committing violent crimes is very low. So if your goal is to protect society from reoffense, the biggest win is to keep people locked up for their 20s; the 2nd-biggest is people in their 30s; and it gets increasingly pointless beyond that. In fact, giving supervised release instead of jailtime is often warranted, because keeping people tied to their communities / sources of employment is one of the best ways to prevent recidivism, while a few years in jail tends to turn people into hardened criminals (with fewer ties to the non-criminal world, and more ties to criminal gangs). In this case, 18 years seems pretty clearly excessive from a protective point of view; it's not even clear any jail time at all is warranted, since some sort of probation with supervision of internet use would likely suffice to prevent him from reoffending. My impression is that many people, especially in the U.S., have a notion of justice that's either more retributive or deterrent based, though. If retributive, that's a pure ethical disagreement. If deterrent, then we might have an empirical disagreement, about which lengths of sentences in fact deter crimes.

jacques_chester 15y ago

The sentence was not handed out for a single crime, but for multiple crimes. Some of those crimes -- threat to kill -- are taken very seriously indeed. Also I imagine the judge will have taken account of the accused's pattern of behaviour and modified the sentence to reflect the fact that he is clearly a menace to society.

inoop 15y ago
I'm not a legal expert so please correct me if I'm wrong, but afaik the US system essentially treats individual charges as individual crimes when it comes to sentencing. Note that a lot of other legal systems don't have such clear cut 'stacking' of sentences, because there is considerable overlap between the charges they correspond to. Legal details aside, my question was more about whether it's morally right to sentence someone to eighteen years for the crimes described in the article?
- anseljh 15y ago
  Nope, there are often sentence enhancements when there are multiple crimes involved or if the defendant has prior convictions. Very common.
- smallblacksun 15y ago
  >Legal details aside, my question was more about whether it's morally right to sentence someone to eighteen years for the crimes described in the article? Posting child porn and death threats? Yeah, that's worth 18 years.
  - inoop 15y ago
    You're oversimplifying. 'Posting child porn' for example turns out to be 'posting a single picture of a pubescent girl having sex with two young boys'. Note that we have not seen the picture, so the girls' age can be anywhere between 10-17 (age range according to Wikipedia article on puberty). Note also that this picture was selected for shock value, and no other child pornography was reported found on the guys' computer. The death threat was to a prominent politician who probably gets such emails on an hourly basis by cooks from all around the country. So basically what you're saying is that eighteen years is appropriate punishment for being a 4chan troll?

maratd 15y ago

> And this gets him eighteen years in prison? In most countries you get eighteen years for murder. I imagine things work the same way all over the world. The prosecutor files every charge imaginable and then requests maximum time during the sentencing hearing. That's his job. The defendant's lawyer then does his job and mitigates the damage. Now, if the defendant is stupid enough to represent himself, pleads guilty to the charges, or doesn't put up much of a fight during sentencing ... well ... you end up with this. Neither the judge nor the prosecutor have a responsibility to be nice. I have a feeling that they especially didn't have any desire to be nice considering what he did. On top of all of that, kiddie porn is a big deal here ... I'd imagine the majority of the time is for that.

lotharbot 15y ago
> if the defendant is stupid enough to represent himself, pleads guilty to the charges, or doesn't put up much of a fight during sentencing ... well ... you end up with this. In this case, the defendant was even stupider. He plead guilty, withdrew his plea, lied during testimony, coached witnesses, and violated the conditions of his release. See pages 22-27 of http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/07/ardolffedssentencingmemo.pdf http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/07/ardolf...

tptacek 15y ago

He was offered 2 years. He rejected it, claiming (apparently falsely!) that he was innocent of the charges. Having been caught seemingly red handed, the prosecution proceeded to throw the book at him.

jdietrich 15y ago
This is exhibit A in "The People vs The American Justice System". Take a plea bargain and get two years, go to trial and get eighteen. Where's the justice in that? Either people are getting away with paltry amounts of jail time for pleading guilty, or they're being punished with long sentences for using their right to a trial. A ninefold difference in sentencing goes far beyond a proportionate incentive to avoid spurious trials. Even if this defendant was abusing the court, is sixteen years a fair punishment for wasting the court's time?
- tptacek 15y ago
  The original plea deal offering of 2 years is what I find appalling; it smacks of a prosecutor who just wants to get the case off his desk as soon as possible. Read the whole sentencing memo; the 239 month recommendation seems entirely reasonable to me. He was offered 2 years, after being caught red handed orchestrating a many-months-long criminal campaign against his neighbors in retaliation for a molestation charge he confessed to. He took it to trial instead. In the process, he violated the terms of his release from confinement. He coached family witnesses in writing to lie about the circumstances of his offense. He told the court directly that the actual victims in the case were attempting to frame him. He was given by the court an opportunity to write an "Acceptance of Responsibility" statement as a means of mitigating his sentence; in it, he told the sentencing judge that he was the victim. As a result, the prosecution wrote: At every turn, the defendant has chosen not to accept responsibility for his actions and to obstruct justice. This Court has had a firsthand opportunity to see defendant’s dangerousness, lack of remorse, and disregard for the law. A lengthy sentence is needed to prevent the defendant from engaging in any further harm. Defendant is dangerous. Defendant is remorseless. Ardolf's own actions in front of the court suggest that he's a psychopath. What judge is going to go easy on someone like that? What gets me here is, if "wifi hacking" wasn't involved, this bind to the "Your Rights Online" neuroreceptors in HN reader brains and we wouldn't be arguing it. This is a crazy person who has thankfully been removed from public circulation. Forget about the wifi stuff. Total red herring.

smazero 15y ago

But by that argument someone who carried out a sustained stalking campaign against someone might actually be guilty of just standing in places. I don't think it's necessarily the mundane details of what they actually did that should be the only determinant of the severity of their punishment. Of course this doesn't mean that an injured party should be able to claim emotional distress from any old thing.

kahawe 15y ago

You got it wrong. He did not get that sentence for hacking. He got it for this: > Barry Ardolf has demonstrated by his conduct that he is a dangerous man. When he became angry at his neighbors, he vented his anger in a bizarre and calculated campaign of terror against them. The calculated and "with intent" part and showing no remorse make it weigh so heavy; he did all that calculated and with full intent of seeing his neighbor going to prison probably for life.