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988 points heavyset_go | 9 comments | | HN request time: 0.645s | source | bottom
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tptacek ◴[] No.45261951[source]
For whatever it's worth, the Reddit story here says that the federal courts used "fraudulent warrants to jail my husband again". Maybe! The other side of that story, via PACER, is a detailed parole violation warrant (you can hear the marshal refer to it in the video); the violations in that warrant:

1. Admitting to using cannabis during supervised release

2. Failing to make scheduled restitution payments and to cooperate with the financial investigation that sets restitution payment amounts.

3. Falling out of contact with his probation officer, who attempted home visits to find him.

4. Opening several new lines of credit.

5. Using an unauthorized iPhone (all his Internet devices apparently have keyloggers as a condition of his release).

These read like kind of standard parole terms? I don't know what the hell happened to get him into this situation in the first place, though.

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tptacek ◴[] No.45262053[source]
OK, I think I found the original thing Rockenhaus was convicted of.

Back in 2014, Rockenhaus worked for a travel booking company. He was fired. He used stale VPN access to connect back to the company's infrastructure, and then detached a SCSI LUN from the server cluster, crashing it. The company, not knowing he was involved, retained him to help diagnose and fix the problem. During the investigation, the company figured out he caused the crash, and terminated him again. He then somehow gained access to their disaster recovery facility and physically fucked up a bunch of servers. They were down a total of about 30 days and incurred $500k in losses.

(He plead this case out, so these are I guess uncontested claims).

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petcat ◴[] No.45262161[source]
If all of that is true, then that is a very serious CFAA charge. It makes sense that they would want to downplay it as "minor" and "not relevant". It sounds like the parole violations came later? In any case, thank you for researching. There is always more to the story.
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mothballed ◴[] No.45262527[source]
Weev 'violated' the CFAA for incrementing a GET request, with his overturned conviction only for wrong jurisdiction. So the government has put us in a position where it's hard to take the CFAA seriously.

We also know from prosecutions in other statutes that the government will often prosecute a a broad crime with many separate sub-definitions of the various way you can break it, then refuse to tell you under which sub-definition you're being charged, meaning you have no way to know if the jury even were unanimously convicting for the same thing and no way to know what you're even defending against.

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1. stockresearcher ◴[] No.45263111[source]
> his overturned conviction only for wrong jurisdiction

What are you getting at?

If an appeals court says “wrong jurisdiction”, that’s an “rm -rf” on the whole entire case. There’s nothing left to argue about.

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2. JadeNB ◴[] No.45263194[source]
> > his overturned conviction only for wrong jurisdiction

> What are you getting at?

> If an appeals court says “wrong jurisdiction”, that’s an “rm -rf” on the whole entire case. There’s nothing left to argue about.

I think your parent comment meant something like "the case wasn't overturned on the basis of deficiencies in the legal theory of the crime."

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3. mothballed ◴[] No.45263244[source]
Yes there is, they can reargue the whole thing in another jurisdiction since he was never 'in jeopardy.'

Considering he was convicted in another jurisdiction, and they can retry him in the 'right' one, why wouldn't a reasonable person anticipate that might happen?

I don't think Weev is living in Ukraine/Transnistria to practice his Slavic languages.

And the reason why I brought up it was overturned, was because I knew someone would mention his case was vacated, and I wanted to make clear it wasn't vacated because there was something improper found about the legal question of the CFAA.

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4. stockresearcher ◴[] No.45263249[source]
If it’s in the wrong jurisdiction, the court doesn’t get to the point where they look at the legal theory.
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5. stockresearcher ◴[] No.45263437[source]
They could start over in the correct jurisdiction. Yes. The case that was being appealed is gone. Gone.

I think that the type of person that excels at software development would also excel at lawyering. But they should probably go to law school and pay attention in class.

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6. ◴[] No.45263552{3}[source]
7. torstenvl ◴[] No.45263984[source]
"jurisdiction" literally means "the power to say what the law is"

If the court had no jurisdiction, it is not possible for them to rule on "deficiencies in the legal theory of the crime" in that case.

8. kemayo ◴[] No.45264294[source]
Generally this is a good thing to happen, because it's fairly quick and easy to argue you're in the wrong jurisdiction... and if that's the case, it doesn't matter what the legal theory was, since the court couldn't convict you anyway.

Perhaps selfishly, I'd rather get out of a trial in the motion to dismiss stage, rather than having to very-expensively argue the merits all the way to the end.

9. JadeNB ◴[] No.45264882{3}[source]
Right. I think your parent comment was pointing out that it's not that the legal theory failed, but that it was never tested, and so might (or might not) still be sound.