

Facebook fugitive attached GPS monitor to a “motorized contraption” - batguano
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/facebook-fugitive-attached-gps-monitor-to-a-motorized-contraption/

======
nfoz
40 years sounds like an awful brutal sentence hanging over this man's head.

Then again, the accusation is that he forged documents and emails, and deleted
others, as part of a lawsuit. That seems pretty bad.

But 40 years literally takes someone's life away. The crime was nonviolent.
Maybe 10 years in jail would be a harsh enough penalty? That's pretty life-
changing. I suppose it's up to the judge, maybe if he wasn't using crazy
methods to flee from bail he wouldn't end up with the max penalty. Seems like
he's screwed now.

This whole thing makes me uncomfortable.

~~~
lione
Seriously. I don't get how a non violent crime like this gets more jail time
then if someone was a heroin selling murderer.

~~~
declan
Welcome to the wonderful world of federal overcriminalization.

Aaron Swartz faced 13 federal felonies (the Feds upped it from 4 to 13 at some
point) and a possible maximum of 50+ years in prison:
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/17393320412/us-
go...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/17393320412/us-government-
ups-felony-count-jstoraaron-swartz-case-four-to-thirteen.shtml)

Then there's the No Electronic Theft Act, which Clinton signed into law. It
made not-for-profit copyright infringement -- think sharing on P2P networks --
a federal felony. Previously it was a civil matter.

Now <gvb> is correct that there are sentencing guidelines that will make the
_likely_ sentence less. But even the outside possibility of a young man or
woman leaving prison when they're 70-80+ years old for a non-violent crime is
remarkable. (Note I'm not defending Paul Ceglia, who may well have committed
fraud and should pay the price if convicted; I'm merely saying that the
punishment should correspond to the gravity of the offense.)

These are DOJ stats for the year 2000, but it gives you an idea of the range
for violent felonies: "The mean prison sentence for murder and nonnegligent
manslaughter was nearly 20 years and 8 months."
[http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/Fssc00.txt](http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/Fssc00.txt)

Harvey Silverglate's book "Three Felonies a Day" is an excellent resource, and
I separately wrote about the overcriminalization of federal law here:
[http://www.cnet.com/news/from-wargames-to-aaron-swartz-
how-u...](http://www.cnet.com/news/from-wargames-to-aaron-swartz-how-u-s-anti-
hacking-law-went-astray/)

~~~
tptacek
Declan, you know you're oversimplifying the Swartz case. We've discussed this
before. You are technically correct that the gap between "likely" and
"possible" is decades, but that outlandish "possible" is, well, outlandish.

The difference between the 7 months Swartz was threatened with by prosecutors
and "50 years" is the question of whether multiple CFAA counts for the same
crime "group". We know the answer to this: they do. Defendants convicted on
multiple counts of CFAA offenses for the same underlying criminal act serve a
sentence for a single count (the most severe). A judge could override this,
but the onus should be on the "50 years" people to cite a CFAA case in which a
judge has ever manipulated CFAA grouping rules to amp up a sentence. The
argument seems to suggest that a judge might be so upset by Swartz that they'd
_throw out a chunk of the sentencing guidelines_.

 _Swartz 's own attorney_ wrote, after his death, that a conviction on all
counts might still leave Swartz at a sentencing level that allowed probation:
his crime was non-remunerative, the statute he was charged on is oriented
heavily towards financial crimes, his primary victim was unmotivated, and he
had no criminal record.

When Swartz's sentence is brought up on a message board, what's really being
discussed is the nature of judicial discretion versus the federal sentencing
guidelines.

That's unfortunate. Leaving aside the fact that any custodial sentence for
Swartz would have miscarried justice, and beyond the trauma of enduring a
federal criminal prosecution, the likely guideline sentence for Swartz's
charge (if you stipulate that he was guilty, which you can't do here) is not
prima facie insane.

But other CFAA sentences _are totally insane_. When you handwave around
Swartz's sentence, you make it easy for people who understand (at least a bit
about) federal sentencing to laugh off other CFAA sentences. But there have
been recent cases in which the CFAA's sentencing process is much more clearly
unjust.

~~~
declan
<tptacek>: Yes, we've been around this circle before, and I don't think we're
going to change each other's minds.

As for Aaron Swartz's attorneys, they would have jumped at the chance for
probation. They explicitly offered it as a deal to the Feds, who rejected it.
Prosecutors held out for a felony plea and prison time:
[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/15/aaron-
swart...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/15/aaron-swartz-s-
unbending-prosecutors-insisted-on-prison-time.html)

So because of the combination of federal overcriminalization (thank you,
Congress) and prosecutorial overzealousness (thank you, Carmen Ortiz), this is
what Aaron had to look forward to:

 _If he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5
years... Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though
the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn 't want to
plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he
committed a crime, something he did not actually believe._
[http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-
learning-l...](http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-
losing-aaron-swartz-part-2)

~~~
tptacek
Did you read her whole post? The hypothetical you're referring to is preceded
by a paragraph that ends with "But Aaron could easily have come out to over a
year in his guideline calculation" in the case where he went to trial and was
found guilty.

------
joshstrange
I work in the correction industry with devices like this one. Most devices
don't have accelerometers in them so so the "motorized contraption" would not
be needed, the picture is too blurry for me to make out what brand of ankle
bracelet this is or I could tell you if it has one. GPS drift would make it
impossible to tell if someone is moving in their house (Normally looking at
GPS points shows a clustering around the house and sometimes as far as a 50+
meters outside their house.

As to those asking how he got it off, the article says it was "sliced" off so
my guess is he cut the strap (then lied about the fall) which cut the fiber
optic cable in the bracelet, he then reattached the fiber optic cable and
taped it up. The police SHOULD have been sent as soon as they got a strap
tamper alert but it appears they believed the fall story. Note most of the
time police don't talk to the participants when this happens, rather a
monitoring company staffs a call center then send recording of the call and
notes to the user's supervisor who then can choose to alert the police.
Apparently there is another way to get these off if the bracelet is loose
enough that involves a plastic bag and sliding it off (a co-worker mentioned a
video going around of it but I've never seen it) but due to the fact this
article mentions they were alerted to it being tampered with I doubt that is
the case.

------
kodis
If all he needed to do was to show some movement of the tracker, he could have
just duct-taped it to a Roomba. He'd get much more realistic motion with much
less effort.

~~~
pinko
Great idea except for the battery life. He presumably wanted more than a few
hours of activity.

~~~
blfr
Doesn't roomba charge itself and then go for another run?

~~~
batguano
This issue is charging the ankle bracelet, not the roomba (which connects
itself to a charger as you point out).

~~~
Fiahil
Well, I guess you could plug the bracelet to a power source with a long cord.

------
sjs382
Like the scene in Home Alone where the kid puts cardboard cutouts on a model
train set, to make the burglars think there's a party happening at the house.
:)

Edit: I guess that scene was more elaborate than I remembered:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHOuoJmcozk#t=2m13s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHOuoJmcozk#t=2m13s)

~~~
danielweber
Apparently there isn't a lot of "Get Smart" on YouTube or else I could have
pointed to that ~20 years earlier.

------
keithpeter
Why is this even a criminal case? Could a civil court not just chuck out the
idiotic claim on the lower 'balance of probabilities' test?

~~~
duskwuff
The criminal case was brought against Ceglia when it became apparent that his
claims to a stake in Facebook were based on forged documents. That's fraud;
it's a criminal offense.

~~~
nikcub
It's interesting that the big law firms like DLA Piper[0] who backed him pro
bono and conducted "extensive due diligence" on his claims walked away without
even much of a tarnished reputation.

[0] Facebook are suing them. [http://abovethelaw.com/2014/10/lawsuit-of-the-
day-facebook-s...](http://abovethelaw.com/2014/10/lawsuit-of-the-day-facebook-
sues-dla-piper/)

~~~
keithpeter
Thanks to grandparent for clarification. Allegedly forging documents will get
you in trouble quickly certainly. I suppose it depends on the resources the
big law firm has for spotting forgery.

------
batguano
I wonder how he got the bracelet off of his ankle, without setting off an
alarm.

~~~
kaeawc
It says in the article that the police were alerted to bracelet tampering:
"The filing said the authorities got suspicious that something was awry with
the GPS device on March 6. An agent spoke with Ceglia on the phone and "Ceglia
reported that the bracelet had been damaged in a fall." But the agent said it
subsequently was "functioning properly" until the next day."

~~~
pinko
This implies that these things must throw false alarms with some regularity,
otherwise this would have been a huge red flag and they wouldn't have
hesitated to follow up immediately.

~~~
danielweber
This seems likely. Even if you get him on the phone, you could have an officer
drive by sometime in the next day to visually inspect that the ankle bracelet
is still there.

(Of course I would get a second bracelet and strap a dummy one to my leg to
show to the officer. Officer would need some way of verifying he's seeing the
right one.)

------
spiritplumber
Everything else aside, this is a beautifully executed hack.

------
matmann2001
Why not attach it to the dog? Or a Roomba?

