Man Who Doxxed Dozens Of People, Engaged In Nineteen 'Swattings', Nets Only One Year In Prison
from the cyber-sentencing-still-mostly-incoherent dept
The treatment of all things "cyber" by the government is incredibly inconsistent. Give someone a password so they can deface a website for 40 minutes and it's two years in jail. Doxx, SWAT, and cyberstalk multiple people and the best the court can do is two years minus time served. The end result is one year in prison for Mir Islam, who doxxed multiple celebrities and politicians, as well as called in fake threats that resulted in the swatting of at least nineteen people, including security researcher Brian Krebs, who uncovered Islam's doxxing tactics.
Krebs' investigation of Islam and his abuse of free credit report services to obtain personal information on a variety of public figures led to the following:
Peeved that I’d outed his methods for doxing public officials, Islam helped orchestrate my swatting the very next day. Within the span of 45 minutes, KrebsOnSecurity.com came under a sustained denial-of-service attack which briefly knocked my site offline.
At the same time, my hosting provider received a phony letter from the FBI stating my site was hosting illegal content and needed to be taken offline. And, then there was the swatting which occurred minutes after that phony communique was sent.
[...]
Nearly a dozen heavily-armed officers responded to the call, forcing me out of my home at gunpoint and putting me in handcuffs before the officer in charge realized it was all a hoax.
The response to the hoax call on Krebs' residence was, by comparison, minimal. Islam also called in a fake active shooter report at the University of Arizona campus. This was apparently in retaliation to a cheerleader's failure to realize Islam's cyberstalking was just another way of saying "I love you."
A woman representing an anonymous “Victim #3” of Islam’s was appearing in lieu of a cheerleader at the University of Arizona that Islam admitted to cyberstalking for several months. When the victim stopped responding to Islam’s overtures, he phoned in an active shooter threat to the local police there that a crazed gunman was on the loose at the University of Arizona campus.
According to Robert Sommerfeld, police commander for the University of Arizona, that 2013 swatting incident involved 54 responding officers, all of whom were prevented from responding to a real emergency as they moved from building to building and room to room at the university, searching for a fictitious assailant. Sommerfeld estimates that Islam’s stunt cost local responders almost $40,000, and virtually brought the business district surrounding the university to a standstill for the better part of the day.
Worse, some of Islam's swatting efforts and cyberstalking occurred while he was "cooperating" with federal prosecutors following his arrest for attempting to sell stolen credit cards to undercover agents.
Federal prosecutors wanted to see Islam jailed for nearly four years -- towards the upper reaches of the mandatory sentencing guidelines. Instead, the judge handed down a sentence of two years. Islam has been in federal custody since July 2015 and that time is being credited towards his sentence, meaning it will only be another year at the most before Islam is free again.
The credit for time served makes sense and the departure from the upper limits of the guidelines is something I would be extremely hesitant to suggest is a bad thing. Prosecutors wanted a much longer sentence, and the allegations here would seem to justify a lengthier imprisonment for Islam.
The problem with the government's fear of anything cyber-related is that the default mode for prosecutors is almost always the upper reaches of the sentencing guidelines, even when the severity of the criminal activity doesn't appear to warrant this sort of punitive sentencing. The government sought a longer sentence for Matthew Keys' minimal participation in a 40-minute headline alteration at a news website. Someone who endangered lives of dozens of people by sending heavily-armed law enforcement officers after them -- in addition to doxxing a large number of public figures and participating in multiple cyberstalkings -- was apparently only deemed dangerous enough to warrant a 46-month sentence, as compared to the 60 months sought in the Keys case.
Then there's this:
Judge Moss, in explaining his brief deliberation on arriving at Islam’s two-year (attenuated) sentence, said he hoped to send a message to others who would endeavor to engage in swatting attacks.
Swatting has the potential to kill people, something clearly not reflected by the "severity" of this sentence.
As Brian Krebs points out, it does send a message, although certainly not the one the judge intended. It says you can endanger the lives of others without seriously affecting your own freedom. It also sends the message that the government -- as a whole -- will remain incoherent and inconsistent in its handling of cybercrime.
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Filed Under: brian krebs, crime, dox, doxxing, mir islam, punishment, swatting
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What's wrong with this picture?
All my points were covered by Tim's article. Jeebus Frak!
Mr. Islam's light sentence might be explained for the more paranoid of us) by unknown involvement with / interference from the FBI (will Mr. Islam be working for the FBI in the future?). From a recent article by Brian Krebs:
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/06/mir-islam-the-guy-the-govt-says-swatted-my-home-to-be-sente nced-june-22/
Most importantly for the government, however, Islam was active on CarderProfit, a carding forum created and run by FBI agents.
Islam ultimately pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit computer hacking, among other offenses tied to his activities on CarderProfit. In March 2016 a judge for the Southern District of New York sentenced (PDF) Islam to just one day in jail, a $500 fine, and three years of probation. [emphasis added]
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Re: What's wrong with this picture?
Via Bruce Schneier's blog / Volokh Conspiracy:
9th Circuit: It’s a federal crime to visit a website after being told not to visit it
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/12/9th-circuit-its-a-federal-crim e-to-visit-a-website-after-being-told-not-to-visit-it/
I wonder how long the prison sentence for THAT 'crime' will be.
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Given the lethal mixture of adrenaline, fear, and heavy weaponry involved in a SWAT team raid, how does what he did not automatically carry a charge of 19 counts of attempted murder?
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Swatting has the potential to kill people...
Government of big business, by big business, for big business, and all that jazz.
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/s
I think it is fair to say, everyone wants the police to show up, but to show up ready for a fucking war zone every damn time?
Not to mention, some may not even be against them showing up ready for a war zone, and just expect them to do a touch of recon before invading a 10 year old's Halo session!
Sure it's not an easy situation to deal with, but it's well known that the police are barely trained to handle these well and come in screaming conflicting orders and causing far more unnecessary mayhem than required. They are definitely using these situations as excuses to just throw caution to the wind and immediately escalating any situation they come to to the maximum from the first second they arrive until they leave.
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You never know when you're gonna need to toss a grenade in a baby crib.
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So don't blame the police for being careful. They try to minimize harm to those lives that matter, and they do that by first throwing grenades, then going in. That way, policemen are reasonably safe to enter assuming that the grenades did not do structural damage.
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Think I'm exaggerating? LOOK AT THIS CASE. 19 out of 19 times, the response was force first, thinking second.
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Look at this case. 19 out of 19 times, the response was preparedness to use force, and when thinking determined that it was not necessary, not a single cop in any of the 19 SWAT teams involved actually killed anyone.
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I'm sure you must be right. Why else would you start off with name-calling?
not a single cop in any of the 19 SWAT teams involved actually killed anyone.
I'm also sure that you wouldn't mind if I held a cocked and loaded gun to your head as long as I didn't pull the trigger, would you?
/s
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But at the heart of it all is some sort of field survey and investigation before deploying deadly force. It would prevent absurdities like throwing grenades at babies and shooting a guy because he tried to defend his family from perceived intruders.
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Fair sentence.
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Re: Fair sentence.
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I'm not sure which of these situations (intending harm vs. not even considering the possibility of harm) is worse.
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That seems like harm to me, and a few orders of magnitude more harm than defacing a website.
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"Nobody got hurt" was a parrot of the original article, where it is used in the narrow sense that there were no reported serious physical injuries. Given the involvement of SWAT and their general tactics, that might be further narrowed as "no physical injuries other than the ones the cops would blame on the unsuspecting residents for their failure to preemptively surrender to armed invaders." Your use, and GP's use, were in the more colloquial sense that there was no harm of any kind - damage to property, physical injury to people or pets, mental distress (note GP's reference to "terrorized by the police invasion"), etc.
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Re: Fair sentence.
Yeah, jail or prison sucks. A year, or two years, is certainly not nothing. But apparently he did this 19 times (showing that this wasn't just a one time mistake), he had a prior record (showing that it might take a little more for him to "learn his lesson"), and he sent a fake letter supposedly from the FBI. Given all that, the sentence, although more than a slap on the wrist, seems too light.
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Re: Fair sentence.
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Of course
This was a completely coherent and consistent message from the courts. Threaten and harass the hoi polo get a slap on the wrist. Threaten, harass, embarrass, or inconvenience the rich, powerful or connected and you’ll be trying to find the bottom of the rabbit hole they throw you in.
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So? Isn't that why it's good to be "rich, powerful or connected"?
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Not powerful enough, apparently.
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Seems like the judge implemented a variation of the 'Hillary Defense', in that he apparently thinks that Islam didn't really mean to hurt anyone, regardless of how reckless his actions.
Hopefully, Arizona will bring charges for violations of state laws or at least a civil tort for recovery of the costs for the various Swat calls.
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it has long been official - though unacknowledged publicly - that we are and have been the land of the free corporation and the home of the brave corporation.
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Another take on his sentence
But another way of looking at this is: if he were innocent, he still would have been sentenced to a full year in jail.
By contrast, Matthew Keys wasn't locked up while waiting for his trial. But if he had, he would have (had to have) been released for time served, because it took two and a half years to come to a decision in his case.
It is hard to argue that we have swift justice in this country, when the accused will spend a significant portion - or more than the sum - of their possible sentence simply awaiting trial.
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Crystal clear
Message received I'm sure, though I doubt it's the one the judge thinks they're sending. SWAT those that annoy you or just targets of opportunity all you want, the worst that you will face if you get caught is a light slap on the wrist for an action that has a high chance of resulting in serious injury or even death of the target thanks to trigger happy cops.
Of course it goes without saying that had the SWATing targeted someone with connections that sentence would likely have been measured in decades rather than two years, but since it was just a few nobodies on the receiving end of a bunch of trigger-happy cops who cares, right? /s
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And how quickly were they made ex-prosecutors?
Unable to supervise an asset, allowing more crime to happen, ignoring the actions....
Unless this doxing idiot knew where Bin Laden was, what could he have possibly offered to make looking away as he kept dicking around worth it? Or perhaps he used his made skillz to convince them he had super good intel to share, and they didn;t bother to check if he was full of shit or not.
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Will none of you liberals have the courage...
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Re: Will none of you liberals have the courage...
to say "Islam is to blame for this"?
Well sort of...I certainly have the courage to say that ALL religion is responsible for the vast majority of hate in the world. Once you get rid of BOTH the Christians and the Muslims, there will probably be peace.
Does that make you feel any better?
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Re: Re: Will none of you liberals have the courage...
You have not read the Bible. One place in particular to start might be in the back of that Book, Revelations. After the Rapture, this place turns into a living hell.
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Islam ties to terrorism
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