
For alleged Russian hacker, a visit to Amsterdam is a costly trip - ssclafani
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/for-alleged-russian-hacker-a-visit-to-amsterdam-is-a-costly-trip/2015/01/30/1e240c96-a33c-11e4-9f89-561284a573f8_story.html
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jacquesm
> "We have a 99.6 percent conviction rate in cybercrime"

I'm sure he sees absolutely nothing weird in that. The Spanish Inquisition
managed to get similar rates. I'm _very_ surprised the Dutch (as in: _my_ )
government is agreeing to this extradition. It's very well possible that this
is in part because of the current animosity between Putin and the rest of the
world.

It's quite possible the guy is guilty but Ari Baranoff is on the record as
having said that he will not be given a fair trial.

~~~
gwern
> I'm sure he sees absolutely nothing weird in that.

If this were a discussion of Japanese conviction rates based primarily on
(coerced) confessions or something like that, then yes, a 99.6% conviction
rate would be suspicious. But you have to remember two things here:

(1) 99.6% is not _that_ much higher than the usual federal prosecution rates
(I think they get a net of ~96% when I looked it up a few months for a
different discussion),

(2) and when Baranoff says “We don’t build our cases on one piece of evidence.
Our cases are built on evidence that is curated over many years. We take our
time to build these cases­ to make sure we have them right.” (the part you
didn't quote), he's not kidding. That's exactly what they do with cyber-crime
cases. They spend years investigating an organization or figure, flipping
people, running markets or forums, extracting records from ISPs and Amazon and
Google, and so on and so forth. Look at the whole tangle of carding cases in
the 2000s with cardingplanet/shadowcrew/etc. For that matter, look at the
Ulbricht Silk Road case right now - the agencies involved spent years busting
random vendors, looting people's emails (eg Ashley Barr's Gmail was searched
on only the vaguest possible suspicion), flipping multiple employees... Read
the trial transcripts if you have a few days to spare.

If anything, I'd say that a rate of 99.6% says bad things about them, but for
an entirely different reason than you: because it implies that they're
inefficiently overdoing their cases, goldplating them & gilding the lily.

~~~
jacquesm
Is there any substantial difference between coerced confessions and plea
bargaining as practiced in the US?

~~~
happyscrappy
I think you are letting your hatred of the US cloud your judgement. Plea
bargaining is mostly a cost saving measure, going to trial is very expensive.

~~~
jacquesm
Justice should not be about cost.

~~~
tptacek
A system without plea bargains offers no incentive for any rational person to
cooperate. It instead encourages everyone, guilty and innocent, to ruthlessly
impose additional costs on the rest of society --- most notably on the
innocent accused, who are allocated fewer resources with which to vindicate
themselves.

~~~
crististm
What about truth? It is assumed that prosecution see you as guilty. But what
if they got the wrong person? It's not like it never happened.

Besides, what is the downside for prosecution (as individual) for a wrongful
convictions?

~~~
tptacek
There is inadequate downside for prosecutors making bad-faith or risky cases.
But the question I posed was practical, not moral: in the absence of plea
deals, there is no disincentive for the guilty accused to grind the system to
a halt with pointless litigation. The people who would pay the steepest price
for that wouldn't be the citizenry at large, but rather _the innocent
accused_.

~~~
jacquesm
Whatever happened to rather that 10 guilty men walk free rather than that one
man be jailed innocent?

The innocent accused _are_ paying the steepest price today, they end up
pleading guilty, lose their livelihood, rights, and lots more.

If the system would grind to a halt it would grind to a halt for everybody,
not just for the guilty. And maybe that would allow for a better system rather
than one where might makes right and the amount of money you can muster for
your defense is the biggest factor in determining the outcome.

~~~
tptacek
No, it does not logically follow that because the innocent accused face an
unjust burden today, stupid decisions we make going forward couldn't make
their burden even worse. There was a New Yorker story about a young defendant
spending years in Rikers waiting for a trial that saw continuance after
continuance; that's what happens today, in a system that relies heavily on
plea deals to clear caseloads.

~~~
jacquesm
I can't make heads or tails of your position. The fact that the justice system
is overloaded has no bearing on the plea bargain situation since it is not
used to lighten the load on the justice system but rather to concentrate more
power on the few remaining cases.

You make it seem as if the plea bargaining system is used as an efficiency
gain where those that 'know they're guilty' are going to plead guilty and all
those that know they are not are going to have their day in court. If that
were the case I would not have a problem with it, alas it is _very_ far from
the truth.

~~~
tptacek
Sure you can. My position is very straightforward. The innocent accused
already wait too long for their day in court because of an overburdened court
system. They would wait vastly longer --- serving, as is the routine in places
like China, the majority of their purported sentence in pre-trial detention
--- if the courts were forced to pointlessly spend weeks on criminal cases in
which neither party believes the accused has any chance of prevailing.

Increase burden on court system: decrease resources allocated to the innocent
accused.

~~~
jacquesm
You are somewhat missing the point: the innocent accused are quite frequently
accepting the plea, even though they are innocent.

So they serve a sentence they shouldn't be serving and they end up being
branded convicts for life.

Have a read:

[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-
inn...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-innocent-
people-plead-guilty/)

~~~
tptacek
No, you've read my comment, made an orthogonal point, and then suggested that
I don't understand that point. I do understand it; it's simply orthogonal to
mine.

You're also very happy to mis-frame my point, repeatedly suggesting that I
believe there's no meaningful injustice in the status quo. That is not what I
believe. I've been pretty clear about the fact that there is a significant
problem that urgently needs correction. It's just not exactly the problem you
care about, and so you caricature my points to try to win the argument.

Once again: regardless of how often the innocent accept bogus plea agreements,
_those innocent who choose to fight their cases_ are greatly harmed by a
system that eliminates plea bargains.

~~~
jacquesm
Those innocent who choose to fight are _also_ greatly harmed by the current
system of plea bargaining because as the linked article shows it's all about
the conviction rate and not about the guilt or innocence of the accused and
when the might of the state is brought to bear those innocent that decided to
fight rather than to accept the plea are still convicted in suspiciously large
numbers.

So plea bargaining as we see it at present does not appear to help those
innocent who fight their cases. Because it's all about winning for the state,
not about guilt or innocence.

~~~
aptwebapps
The current system, which includes plea bargains, is greatly flawed.
Prosecutors in the US simply have too much power as well as distorted
incentives. If they did not have this power then they would not be able to
abuse the plea bargain system as they do. But eliminating plea bargains would
not be an improvement. Despite the abuses it does improve efficiency and if it
did not exist it would not materially reduce prosecutorial power although it
would reduce the number of convictions per year. Bad plea bargains are a
symptom, not the cause.

------
kw71
> "We have a 99.6 percent conviction rate in cybercrime"

AUSA Paul Fishman also prosecuted the famous Auernheimer "ipad hack" case, and
then went on to watch judges in the appeals court reverse the conviction on
procedural grounds and admonish the way that Fishman and his office handled
the case.

I wonder if the statistic takes into account situations like that, or if
weev's case wasn't considered "cybercrime."

At any rate it is nice to see that Fishman also obtains indictments against
real criminals from time to time.

------
masida
I expect HN people to get their vocabulary straight and use the word "hacker"
only for the people that build things. This story is obviously about a
cracker.

~~~
jacquesm
Unfortunately nobody cares. So re-claiming the word hacker for the good guys
is an exercise in futility.

~~~
walshemj
And like many English words Hacker has several meanings and trying to go back
to the 60's usage at MIT is I afraid a pointless exercise just Like King Cnut
trying to hold back the tide.

~~~
dang
The creative and transgressive meanings of the word "hacker" have been around
about equally long and both go back to the MIT milieu. Its first appearance in
print referred to breaking into phone networks. (Sorry I don't have links
handy but this has been discussed many times on HN.) So it's not true that the
word started out good and was corrupted by misunderstanding... but I bet that
claim is also about as old as both usages!

Agreed about pointlessness in any case.

~~~
walshemj
I thought that the MIT Model railroad club usage was well before phone phreaks
and blue boxing - not sure when STD dialing came in in the states

~~~
dang
This is what I was thinking of:

[http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-
of...](http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacker/)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060715031620/http://listserv.l...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060715031620/http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-
bin/wa?A2=ind0306B&L=ads-l&P=R5831&m=24290)

------
benbristow
"catchmeifyoucan"

I guess he got caught.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I think you're right. But the article is poorly edited. The final paragraph
begins with the word "he", while the previous paragraph mentions both Drinkman
and Kalinin.

So it's possible that "he" refers not to Drinkman, but to Kalinin, who has not
yet been caught.

------
codecamper
what eedjits keep 130 million credit card numbers in a computer that is
attached to the Internet. Gross negligence is not a crime?

~~~
tptacek
I'm going to go with "the entire economy of the world" as an answer to that
question. _Everyone_ does this. And there are much worse things attached to
the Internet than the payment card information of virtually everyone with a
credit card.

