AT&T hacker wants US govt to pay for the time he spent in prison
In an open letter addressed to members of the New Jersey District Court, FBI, and DOJ, Andrew “weev” Auernheimer is seeking monetary restitution for the time he was confined to the jurisdiction of the New Jersey District Court and he spent in federal prison after being convicted for publishing a list of emails and AT&T authentication IDs of early iPad adopters.
“I have, over the course of 3 years, been made the victim of a criminal conspiracy by those in the federal government. This was a conspiracy of sedition and treason, perpetrated with violence by a limited number of federal agents to deprive me of my constitutional rights to a fair trial and unlawfully put me in prison,” he wrote. “This is not a hallucination on my part. These claims were in fact verified by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals when they vacated the false judgement against me imposed by the court of Judge Susan D. Wigenton.”
Auernheimer, a hacker and member of Goatse Security, was sentenced to spend 41 months in prison for his role in the harvesting and publishing emails and AT&T authentication IDs of 114,000 early-adopters of Apple’s iPad in 2010.
His sentence was vacated because of a technicality: he was sentenced by a New Jersey federal court, despite the fact that he lived in Arkansas and the servers he and his conspirator accessed were located in Texas and Georgia.
There is still the possibility that the government will appeal the case to the Supreme Court and, if not, that he will be re-indicted in a new jurisdiction.
Nevertheless, he is pressing on with the request. “I want history to record that I made an honest and public attempt to get restitution for the violence the government committed against me. Whatever I do next, I want people to know that I tried civil and peaceful resolution first,” he stated.
He is asking for 28,296 Bitcoins (around $13 million) – one for each hour of each (1179) day he “was not allowed to freely exercise his liberties as a citizen.”
“I do not accept United States dollars, as it is the preferred currency of criminal organizations such as the FBI, DOJ, ATF, and Federal Reserve and I do not assist criminal racketeering enterprises,” he concluded, and added that he will be directing the money “towards a good and charitable cause.”
“Andrew Auernheimer was convicted following a jury trial, and the charges against him were dismissed based on venue, not on their merits. Any suggestion to the contrary is a misunderstanding of the court’s opinion,” a spokesperson for New Jersey District Court commented the letter.