Coding Sanity

There's a story at Slashdot about a teenaged hacker named Brad Willman who broke into 3,000 computers using a trojan he wrote. He created some infected pictures, and then distrbuted them on child porn groups, using them to gain access to the downloaders compluters. Anyway, he managed to track down a judge who was contemplating abusing a boy, and had him arrested. The Computer Crime Research Center has an article about him. Anyway, it looks like the judge could have got off scott free due to this "hackers" actions, Willman said in response:

“In one way, he’s won because he won’t have to go to prison. But in another way, other people know about him now, and they can watch out for him. He’s not as free as he used to be before all of this happened.”

So, he's effectively destroyed any chance of convicting a pedophile, and this is his pathetic response? Since Willman had complete control over the judge's computer, of course the judge couldn't be convicted because of evidence on said computer, For all we know Willman planted it there. It gets even more worrying when you hear more about Willman. He is a serious loner, spending almost all his free time monitoring the computers he has hacked, reading emils, monitoring downloads. He calls himself Omni-Potent, sme illustrative quotes:

• "I judged these people by reading their incoming and outgoing e-mails"
• "Sure, a violation of privacy you must cry, but if you have nothing hurting kids, the future of the world, then there's no reason to worry as that is all that Omni-Potent protects"
• "Omni-Potent's service thus far has been provided without cost to the public. Not one dime has been provided to Omni-Potent and yet there has been tremendous success in providing accurate information."
• "It is after all, technology which helped to find me and mess up important investigations by attempting to lift my veil"

There's no doubt that this young man is seriously disturbed. Considering that he would have had to view the child porn he downloaded in order to "judge" it, one wonders about his motives.

Mor importantly he has committed a massive hacking attack, and should be in jal. However, it appears that if your hacking is targeted against people who society disapproves of (admittedly quite rightly so in this case), then you can hack people at your leisure. The reality is that none of us would welcome such intrusive surveillance, no matter what the aim, especially from a self-appointed teenaged "judge"

Happily the judge was sentenced to jail, but easily might not have been.