
Sentenced to 10 years, Marty Gottesfeld wrote about Bureau of Prisons corruption - DyslexicAtheist
https://medium.com/@barrettbrown/inmate-marty-gottesfeld-wrote-about-prison-corruption-then-the-prison-silenced-him-d7de0349dc02
======
DyslexicAtheist
for anyone new to this story, here additional coverage:

" _Today is the beginning of Marty 's 4th week week on a hunger strike. His
demands are so modest: non-toxic water and to appear over the phone for an
emergency hearing._"[1][2]

 _" Whistleblower Marty Gottesfeld, serving 10 YEARS in prison for exposing
medical abductions by Boston Children's Hospital, placed in solitary
confinement"_[3]

[1]
[https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.505138...](https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.505138/gov.uscourts.nysd.505138.116.0.pdf)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/FreeMartyG/status/1211823172493942785](https://twitter.com/FreeMartyG/status/1211823172493942785)

[3] [https://www.mintpressnews.com/marty-gottesfeld-another-
whist...](https://www.mintpressnews.com/marty-gottesfeld-another-
whistleblower-in-solitary-confinement/256331/)

~~~
tptacek
In what sense did Gottesfeld "blow a whistle"? He's a _cause celebre '_ in the
right-wing blogosphere (because Justina Pelletier is, as well), but I can't
figure out why. From what I can say, all his information came from the right-
wing blogosphere as well; all he did was react violently to it.

~~~
jessaustin
Everything I've read about this case has been in Mint Press. Are we really
supposed to consider _that_ "the right-wing blogosphere"? I feel like we're
losing something when words no longer have specific meanings... why would
"right-wingers" care more about medical abuse and kidnapping than "left-
wingers"?

In olden times, advocating for more merciful prison terms was also not
considered "right-wing". Is it really different now? I guess at least
Gottesfeld hasn't been called "antisemitic" yet... he's no Jeremy Corbyn.

~~~
tptacek
I have no idea what "Mint Press" is and it is not what I'm referring to when I
talk about the right-wing blogosphere ("blogosphere" is the wrong word;
whatever the word that captures "online community" is what I'm looking for;
Michelle Malkin, who was just booted from YAF(!) for vouching for white
supremacist Nick Fuentes, took a picture with Justina Pelletier, and Mike
Huckabee wrote an article about it.)

I'm neither making up nor projecting the fact that Justine Pelletier is a
_cause celebré_ among right-wingers.

Incidentally: I'm not casting aspersions (in this instance). Like I said
downthread, _nobody_ in this story (except Justina herself) comes out looking
good. Justina's parents? Just awful. BCH? Not much better. Of course, nobody
looks _worse_ than Martin Gottesfeld.

~~~
jessaustin
_Justina 's parents? Just awful._

OK, it's this sort of low-brow dismissal that causes me to actually dig
through enough search engine BS to find the "reputable" take. [0] [1] So good
job, I guess. I find in those two long articles nothing about the parents'
behavior to be even suspect, let alone "awful", let alone worse than BCH. That
is a totally unsupported garbage judgment, of the sort one might expect from a
neurologist with 7 months of experience assigned to be the lead physician for
a child diagnosed with chronic metabolic problems and acute intestinal
distress. Oh, wait... that's what happened at BCH!

If the intention of the state of Massachusetts is to have fewer juvenile
patients traveling from out of state for medical care, their policies are
absolutely correct.

[0]
[https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/15/justina/vnwzbbN...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/15/justina/vnwzbbNdiodSD7WDTh6xZI/story.html)

[1] [https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/16/month-
medical-o...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/16/month-medical-
ordeal-conclusion-still-uncertain/Y7qvYTGsq8QklkxUZvuUgP/story.html)

~~~
tptacek
It's, of course, neither low-brow nor a dismissal, involving as it did me
reading a bunch of other sources to get the context of what Brown was talking
about --- literally the opposite of what 'pg meant when he coined the term.
You don't _like_ what I have to say, but it is fine if we simply disagree.

In the Boston Globe story alone, you have the Pelletiers doctor- and hospital-
shopping both in Boston and in Connecticut, reported for abuse by their own
doctors in Connecticut, yelling at the BCH doctors, being so disruptive during
family visits they had to have their visitations curtailed, and, most
memorably, threatening to sue the Connecticut facility BCH found to move
Justina to, resulting in that facility being unable to accept Justina; in
other words, rather than getting Justina back home, her parents prioritized
winning some weird argument they felt they were having.

Like I said, BCH also doesn't look great in this story.

~~~
jessaustin
"Doctor shopping" is a term invented in order to deprive patients in pain of
the medication they need; it has nothing to do with this case. The idiom you
may have intended to use is "getting a second opinion". Many good physicians
encourage this practice; many poor physicians do not. The yelling about suing
the Connecticut facility occurred only after the Connecticut facility was
suggested, which was _six months_ into the kidnapping. I'm not surprised the
patient and her family weren't so trusting at that time. There were probably
financial considerations as well as legal ones to this suggested transfer. A
good reporter might have investigated that.

I'll stipulate that the family got more emotional than I would in the same
situation. However, they didn't get any more emotional than one might expect.
Their kid was dying, _then_ they weren't allowed to see their dying kid.
Emotional people can go to a mechanic and get their car fixed. They can go to
the vet and get their dog fixed. They can go to an accountant and get their
taxes done. What is so special about hospital physicians, that they should
never have to deal with any emotion other than awestruck adoration? Answer:
they're allowed to lock their customers in. The law might support it, but only
in an _ad hoc_ , "possession is 9/10" sense. They can tell the state "hey
we've already kidnapped this kid and our lawyers are on the case" instead of
"you should convince a judge to send armed police to kidnap this kid". That's
why big hospitals with lots of lawyers do this sort of thing and smaller
facilities don't.

Calling these parents "awful" is just consequence-free internet big talking,
joined in this case with left-hand/right-hand they-both-have-good-points-who-
can-say pretend moderation. Less of that, please.

------
thrownaway954
I feel really bad for this dude and hope he's ok when they do finally hear
from him. First off 10 years for a DOS attack is a little extensive in my
book. I really feel that these prison sentences are extreme in the case of a
non-violent crime.

That all being said I think there just HAD to be a better way of going about
helping the girl in the hospital. I don't get what a DOS on the hospital was
suppose to accomplish.

~~~
siffland
This is the US, the chances of him serving all 10 years is slim, probably
parole out after a few. Also anytime he already served in jail will go towards
his sentence.

However, this is a hospital, imagine if the DOS somehow would of contributed
to a death.

~~~
bluntfang
what would be the sentence for organizing a physical DOS on the hospital? ie
filling the emergency room up with protesters such that emergency care is
impossible.

~~~
tedunangst
Five of the Chicago seven were sentenced to five years each.

------
8bitsrule
Barrett Brown, author of the linked article, is a journalist who spent
2010-2016 in Federal prisons and was fined $900,000 for digging into Austin
intel operation Stratfor. (His mother got 6 months of probation for
'obstruction'.) Brown spent 6 months of his time in 'the hole'.

Makes sense that he's interested in a Federal prisoner who is being held
incommunicado. Makes sense that we'd be interested in knowing about stuff like
that. Mess with the wrong people, and ... justice is in the eyes of the
beholders.

Another article on Gottesfeld, by a CIA whistleblower:

[https://www.mintpressnews.com/marty-gottesfeld-another-
whist...](https://www.mintpressnews.com/marty-gottesfeld-another-
whistleblower-in-solitary-confinement/256331/)

~~~
tptacek
As I recall (I'm not looking at the documents right now), Brown didn't "dig
in" to Stratfor so much as function as an accessory to the hack of Stratfor by
Jeremy Hammond and his crew, after which he actively obstructed the
investigation, both by Stratfor and by the DOJ (including a sad attempt to
hide an incriminating laptop during a search).

It seems clear to me that Brown was certainly criminally culpable, but also
that his sentence was outlandish and unjust.

It's less clear to me that what happened to Gottesfeld was wrong. For one
thing: Gottesfeld doesn't appear to be any sort of "whistleblower". His
information about the Justina Pelletier case came from the right-wing media,
where the case had gone viral. Moreover, his response to that information was
to organize DDOS attacks that shut down the electronic pharmacy at Boston
Children's Hospital; they literally had to go back to paper prescriptions and
faxes during the attack. He had originally targeted a fundraising website BCH
was running, but quickly realized that he was attacking the infrastructure of
the hospital itself, which he then bragged about taking down.

After being caught, he attempted to flee to Cuba, but stranded himself just
off the Cuban coast and had to be rescued by a Disney Cruise ship, which took
him back to the US.

The final thing I want to point out is that Barrett Brown is a person who
appears to have believed that Stratfor was a powerful mercenary intelligence
outfit, and not a grifting zine for aspirational Tom Clancy types with desk
jobs. Stratfor was a figure of fun in the real intelligence community, and had
none of the malign influence Barrett attributed to them; if anything, by
helping arrange their hack, he helped the real IC. Certainly nothing Stratfor
did justified dumping the credit cards of people who had subscribed. But, more
importantly: take whatever Brown says with an appropriate tonnage of salt.

~~~
8bitsrule
Thanks for the added details. (Yes, there's more than enough to try to
remember these days.)

Agreed on Brown's sentence. The DDOS attack was a dumb stunt. But that doesn't
explain Gottesfeld's current (gagged) situation. Both remind me of Aaron
Schwarz, another example of the punishment not fitting the crime. But he was
not a journalist; that part is more concerning.

~~~
tptacek
Aaron Swartz did nothing resembling what Gottesfeld did; the comparison is
outrageously unfair to him.

~~~
8bitsrule
No such comparison was made. In case you didn't deliberately miss the
outrageous point: when it comes to the Feds, often the persecution does not
fit the crime, but rather some "make an example of them" agenda. It's nothing
new, you're probably old enough to remember Operation Sundevil.

------
Semaphor
Having never heard of Martin Gottesfeld or Justina Pelletier before, and just
spending some time reading articles, I'm pretty disgusted. At face value this
seems like a horrible miscarriage of justice on many, many levels. Now I'm not
exactly a fan of the USA, but this all seems a bit over the top, but I can
find nothing debunking any of it. Does anyone have articles with dissenting
view points about either of them, bringing arguments in favor of
Massachusetts, BOP, or the Boston Children’s Hospital?

~~~
seemslegit
Do you really need an argument in favor of Boston Children’s Hospital to
realize that DoSing a hospital is nowhere near the scope of either a legally
or morally acceptable course of action to deal with something like this even
if his take on the case was 100% correct ?

~~~
Semaphor
If you want to engage in that, does that make him deserving of being in a
secret (?) prison? Does that preclude the need of arguments in favor of them
to excuse them of their treatment of Justina Pelletier?

I think you read something into my comment that isn't there.

edit: And I'm not even sure I could categorically state that DoSing a
fundraiser of a hospital engaging in (at least from what I've read in the
articles) medical kidnapping, using wards of state as guinea pigs, etc. is
morally wrong. Another reason for my request for differing opinions.

~~~
leftyted
You're far too credulous. This guy seems like an absolute loon to me. I find
his claims of "secret prisons" and widespread corruption extremely dubious.
You have an anti-US bias ("I'm not exactly a fan of the USA") that you should
try to account for.

> Does that preclude the need of arguments in favor of them to excuse them of
> their treatment of Justina Pelletier?

The two things aren't related. The parents challenged the hospital in court
and won. I think there's clearly an issue here (the hospital seems to have
gone too far), but we Americans -- barbaric though we may be -- have means of
settling disagreements without DoSing hospitals.

~~~
Semaphor
> You have an anti-US bias ("I'm not exactly a fan of the USA") that you
> should try to account for.

Yes. I agree. This is why I asked for arguments in favor of the other side. So
far I've read nothing but articles supporting Justina (and her parents) and
Marty and their versions of the story. Then I asked for other viewpoints. And
instead you tell me I shouldn't believe everything when I literally said "At
face value" and that it seems over the top.

------
tptacek
This Barrett Brown piece doesn't really say anything, except that Barrett
Brown is very angry at how Barrett Brown been treated by the Obama
administration and, apparently, by journalists including and in the orbit of
Glenn Greenwald.

As to Marty Gottesfeld, Brown has little to say, other than that he's been
transferred to a different federal prison and that his wife has trouble
staying in communication with him. Brown has much more to say about his own
treatment than that of Gottesfeld.

Gottesfeld, if you're unfamiliar, is serving 10 years for launching a botnet
DDOS attack against Boston Children's Hospital.

Sometime around 2013, (mostly) right-wing media took up the cause of Justina
Pelletier, a teenager who had been referred by her physician to BCH and, after
being admitted, had been taken into BCH's custody after a court determined
that her parents had been harming her and impeding her care. Her parents
didn't regain custody for over a year. The case is complicated, and nobody in
it looks good.

Gottesfeld, a self-declared "anon", decided to declare "OpJustina", appealing
for people to attack the facilities that had been involved in Pelletier's
care. He recruited a 40,000 node router botnet which managed to take BCH off
the Internet for several days. In the process, he shut down their central
prescription service, their physician scheduling system, and all email between
doctors, as well as the fundraising page that had been his declared target. He
also managed to disrupt systems at several other facilities, including Dana
Farber and Harvard Medical, which were hosted on a related network.

The FBI very quickly tracked Gottesfeld down because one of the accounts he
had used to cheerlead the attack was registered under his name. They obtained
a search warrant and found computers with incriminating evidence. Gottesfeld
retained Tor Ekelund, the well known CFAA lawyer, and met with the DOJ to
discuss a plea, during which he admitted to the attacks.

He then fled to Cuba in an unmarked 23 foot open-cabin motorboat, with his
wife, passports, cash, and computers. His boat lost propulsion off the Cuban
coast and, unfortunately for him, he was rescued not by the Cuban Coast Guard
but by a Disney Cruise Ship, which returned him to Florida, where he was
promptly arrested.

At his detention hearing, the US Attorney stated for the record that the
guideline range they had been contemplating at the time of Gottesfeld's
meeting was 3-4 years, and that there was some substantial possibility that,
had he plead out before an indictment, he might avoid prison time altogether
(at that stage of the investigation it may have been unclear how much damage
Gottesfeld had actually caused). Instead, Gottesfeld fired and repudiated Tor
Ekelund, and another lawyer, took his case to court, lost, refused to take
responsibility after his conviction, offered a post-conviction memorandum
stating that he was morally required to DDOS BCH and that he'd likely do it
again, and managed to secure for himself a 10 year sentence.

I guess my point is just, don't be this clown.

~~~
gus_massa
> _had been taken into BCH 's custody after a court determined that her
> parents had been harming her and impeding her care._

Do you have a link for the court decision? It's not clear how much proof did
the hospital provide, and I guess the initial decision was a cautionary
measure (because for the judge is safer to do something wrong than doing
nothing and facing a tweetstorm in case there is a problem).

> _I guess my point is just, don 't be this clown._

I agree with that.

~~~
tptacek
I don't, but the court documents are all available on PACER. The hospital did
shut down the networks for its formulary, deliberately; Gottesfeld was, at the
time, bragging that there were active network intrusions (SQLI, spear
phishing, &c) underway, and my understanding is that between that and the DDOS
attacks, the systems were taken down as a precaution.

It's undisputed, including by Gottesfeld, that these systems were taken down
as a direct result of his attacks. The only point of contention I've found
(this is in the sentencing memorandum back-and-forth) is that Gottesfeld
believes damage from systems shut down (or kept down) after his intrusion
shouldn't be imputed to him. He concedes some measure of culpability for the
systems BCH shut down.

~~~
gus_massa
> _the court documents [about Justina] are all available on PACER_

Let's try to find and read them. My guess is that this story will be reposted
in a few day, and perhaps we can discuss the backstory part of this with more
data.

Note: Perhaps I was not clear, but I agree with most of your initial comment.
I just specially agree with your last sentence.

~~~
tptacek
My comment was based on the PACER documents; I have found and read them. But I
can't link to them.

------
fsloth
Anonymously DOS:sing a hospital because a few families disagreed with their
policies is not a heroic work of hactivism. Just because a party is a dick
does not morally oblige you to endanger medical treatment of hundreds of
individuals.

I would take everything Mr. Gottesfeld communicates with a grain of salt.

------
afthonos
> it’s one of many reasons why I also advocate revolution, preferably followed
> by public executions

I feel this man doesn’t understand what he’s asking for. And should the
revolution happen, he will be shocked to find himself in an interrogation
room, screaming that they should be torturing and executing the _real_ bad
guys, not upstanding revolutionaries like himself.

~~~
dclowd9901
I don’t follow your illustration.

~~~
bpodgursky
If you throw away the rules, the rules stop applying to everyone, not just the
revolutionaries.

The rule of law is not a tool of oppression; it's a check on the people with
power and guns.

The revolutionaries do not have the power. So throwing away the legal system
is far, far more likely to just lead to an unchecked re-entrenchment of
whoever is in charge, not a new system.

If things are truly, truly catastrophic, maybe that's a risk you're willing to
take. But since the average American is not, in fact, dying in the streets,
most really want to continue living their lives in relative prosperity and
relative freedom.

~~~
wayoutthere
Right, which is why modern revolutionaries favor "direct action" against an
unfair system -- in addition to protests, this includes things like
intentionally turning a blind eye to shoplifters (aka "no snitching"),
stealing from your employer, or actively sabotaging their plans. It's easy to
disguise as incompetence or laziness because there's no explicit coordination.

We all have to work to eat, but nothing says people legally have to do a good
job in most positions -- and it's easy to get away with if you can talk a good
game. The idea is that because the rules aren't enforced against the people at
the top, why should the people at the bottom help enforce them against their
peers? If the police are a tool of the oppressive state, why would you help
them in any way? If you're systemically oppressed, why would you not be
dishonest and game the system in every way you could?

~~~
seemslegit
You are literally advocating for at-will employment here, which says noone
cares if you're genuinely or politically incompetent and will be fired all the
same.

~~~
wayoutthere
You have the causality reversed -- at-will employment is the norm in the US
because union-busting prevents collective bargaining. Political incompetence
is the result of this situation, not the cause of it.

Corporate leaders are generally on negotiated contracts that protect them in
the event of genuine incompetence (the "golden parachute"), which reduces the
motivation for political incompetence. Regular workers and middle management
rarely get that luxury.

~~~
seemslegit
For causality to be reversed unions and collective bargaining would have had
to exist and be the norm prior to at-will employment. More like unions and
collective bargaining were successfully discredited by engaging in excesses of
their own - some along the lines you advocated

~~~
wayoutthere
Collective bargaining works just fine in countries that protect it. I'm way
more ok with the excesses being spread among multitudes of workers than having
those "excesses" concentrated in the bonuses of executives -- which is the
situation we have today.

Fixing this requires having an honest discussion about how we distribute
wealth between workers and owners. But it's not surprising the people who
currently take the lion's share are actively preventing that conversation from
happening.

None of this is particularly radical, and it's basically what Bernie Sanders
is running on. His positions are solidly center-right by European standards,
so it's not like he's proposing some radical thought experiment.

~~~
seemslegit
Pretty sure Bernie Sanders is not running on the platform of encouraging
shoplifting or sabotaging your workplace.

~~~
wayoutthere
He’s not; but the far left does. Bernie isn’t remotely far left. He’s
advocating for solutions within the existing framework of capitalism, the far
left wants anarcho-communism (the same way the far right wants anarcho-
capitalism). That’s not gonna happen, so extremists on both sides say fuck
your employer and steal.

