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]
> The story drew the attention of Marty Gottesfeld, a computer-security expert. He was appalled at the treatment to which Justina and her family were being subjected and he decided to act. He initiated a denial of service attack against the Children’s Hospital computer system and against the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network, where Justina was later moved.
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.
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.
Right now, in this time and place, a news source that has admitted ties to Russia and the Syrian government, is a right wing news source in the States.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
Which is why I advocate public intoxication and discussion of politics. It’s beneath the sort I oppose and would benefit the sort I support taking action.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Or the revolutionaries take the power and then behead the president, then the 1%, then whoever disagree with them, then whoever think that the beheading is out of control and then some random people that is not nice enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
I think that's what GP meant about "Americans aren't dying in the streets" -- the French lower class were. Their revolution was about survival, which made it quite popular among the poor.
One thing you seem to have overlooked is that the rules have already stopped applying to those in power. CEOs make murderous mistakes and leave a company with millions. Police regularly kill innocent people in the street (and their homes!) and walk away scot free. Politicians are completely unaccountable and can flaunt the law with no regard. I’m struggling to see how things would be any different in a bottom’s-up revolution.
By the way, I don’t believe such an action is the right way to make change, I just think that it’s a very privileged position to take that most people have something to lose by the demolition of our current institutions.
Protip: describing oneself as an "Obama-era victim" is not a great way to win support among people who support prisoner rights or object to authoritarianism. Having your case pushed on medium by a guy whose preceding writeup was a "defensive publication" against a neighbour who (checks notes) "screamed at his dog" is also... not great.
If you ignore the typical propaganda and research the actual policies of Obama you are likely to come to the conclusion he was the Bush dynasties 5th and 6th term. Despite all the rhetoric he continued nearly every significant policy that Bush implemented. You might find weird things like the fact Biden actually wrote the Patriot Act.
I'm not under the impression that either Obama or Biden were or are friends of the cryptoanarchic hacktivist - this is just not the business that politicians or governments are in. But it's fairly clear whose voter base has a higher degree of sympathy for prisoners and support for keeping checks on the power of police, corrections officers et. al.
Another interesting thing I found due to doing research after Google redefined fascism as right wing during the election season (it was not defined as right wing before) was that FDR, the father of the modern democrat party, wrote letters to Hitler and Mussolini praising fascism, how inspirational it was, and how closely aligned it was with their own socialist movement in America. Ponder for a second, what if, just what if our liberal biased educations were more about generating a sense of questionless support for authoritarianism instead of the opposite.
Wow; a time traveler from 2008 has appeared in HN. Pro-tip: the US "left," outside of the Bernie Sanders left, is as totalitarian and evil as the "right." The Obama administration was absurdly totalitarian and run by lizard-man banker types; at least some part of the activist left was against war and the surveillance state during the Bush administration. Obama's regime pretty much destroyed the activist left; they dissolved into a froth of people being butthurt at each other over stupid purity spirals, rather than, you know, helping poor people and avoiding war.
That said, I more or less agree with you that the person who wrote all this is probably a loony; DDOSing a hospital is not something sane people do.
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?
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 ?
Sometimes sacrifices have to be made, sometimes children have to suffer and die, for a moral outcry to be marshalled. Totally agree with seemslegit, he botched the political poker by not upping the stakes.
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.
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.
> 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.
The authoritarians in this nation don't have logic or the facts on their side. They make up for it with endless repetition. Every punishment for subjects, no matter how obviously extreme, must be supported. Every crime committed by the police, no matter the horrific circumstances, must be defended. Every authoritarian abuse of power must be good. If it's confusing to you, overseas, imagine living here and being subject to this noise constantly.
[EDIT:] To be clear, I don't particularly believe or disbelieve any particular allegation in TFA. This is just an observation about comments ITT and how they echo comments in every thread about how we little unimportant people have overstepped our bounds.
Of course it doesn't excuse secret prisons ("communication management unit" is a very nice euphemism), there was probably a lot of wrong with the treatment of Justina Pelletier, and the morally and normatively bankrupt state of the BOP is well known - it's just that this guy is a really bad example to showcase this over.
And if he indeed only disrupted a fundraising event rather than the hospital operation it could be a serious miscarriage of justice (with complicity from the news outlets who described it as such if this was amenable to fact checking), but this should be argued by lawyers familiar with the case because PR-wise he has very little going for him.
He DoSed the hospital, forcing them to basically shut down their internet service for multiple days. No transfer of medical records in or out. No radiological imaging in or out.
Patient dieing on the bed and need to access their MRI scan from another hospital? Nope.
Marty was (and I'm sure still is) incredibly arrogant. As the FBI got closer and closer to catching him, he would continually make up different stories about how "Anonymous" was doing all of this, etc. etc. After confronting him with irrefutable evidence, he made claims about large botnets he controlled, and other various crimes. His goal immediately shifted from completely innocent to criminal mastermind (again, huge arrogance)
After being caught (which he was 100% certain would never happen), he attempted to flee the country by boat with his wife, almost died, and was picked up by a cruise ship.
He is not a physically abusive guy, but something is not mentally 100% with him. He had an ok IT consultant career before all of this, but he very much assumed he was smarter than everyone else.
Edit: Also not surprised about his outrageous claims of secret prisons, toxic water, etc. This is just what the guy does, bullshits and makes stuff up. He probably actually believes what he is saying (again, mentally off).
Thanks! Do you have an article for this? I can't say I looked too far into him, finding the Justina case far more problematic, but searching still mostly showed up articles with a positive spin.
I had never heard of Justina Pelletier until today. As someone with substantial familiarity with how things work in the social services portions of Massachusetts state government as well as the culture of the state (I grew up and currently live in MA) her story does not surprise me in the slightest. This general pattern of one wrong call in how a case is handled being perpetuated through the rest of the case is not an uncommon pattern when things go badly.
People in this state very much take for granted that the administrative portion of government is competent and knows what it's doing. Government here is generally competent but there are many pockets of incompetent political appointees and totally under-resourced teams and there's no way of telling which is which from the outside. People also take as fact the word of big important prestigious organizations that are experts in what they do (and with good reason, they are usually right). BCH and similar may be experts as a whole and government may be competent in general but these institutions are made up of people and people aren't perfect and they get things wrong sometimes. Someone at BCH clearly made the wrong call. That wrong call got plopped on the desk of some overworked bureaucrat who takes it at face value because they're overworked and they're experts so why not trust them, they made the wrong call. So then the next person at BCH sees in this girl's file that she came in for X, got referred to the state, the state took her from her parents and that influences how they treat her going forward. This goes on and you get a heck of a feedback loop because everyone is just content to assume that the state and the experts know best and the parents are just whining about it. Nobody is in a position to evaluate the big picture and even if they do how do you stop the loop and say "hey wait, this looks wrong". I could fill a novel with all the sob stories like this that I know though most of them relate to drug addicts and the elderly so they wouldn't tug a heartstrings nearly as much as this story does. The culture of the state simply does not equip people in "the system" (both the government and private institutions like BCH) to doubt or re-evaluate the prior results of the system and the conditions of the state bureaucracy are not sufficient for the bureaucrats to reliably make the right calls the first (and often only) time around. It's sad but it is what it is. This is a complex problem that many societies grapple with and not the kind of thing any individual can change on their own.
Regarding Martin Gottesfeld, I am not informed enough to comment.
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.
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.
> 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.
He is serving federal, not state, prison time. “Parole out after a few” only applies to state prison.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread"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...
[2] https://twitter.com/FreeMartyG/status/1211823172493942785
[3] https://www.mintpressnews.com/marty-gottesfeld-another-whist...
> The story drew the attention of Marty Gottesfeld, a computer-security expert. He was appalled at the treatment to which Justina and her family were being subjected and he decided to act. He initiated a denial of service attack against the Children’s Hospital computer system and against the Wayside Youth and Family Support Network, where Justina was later moved.
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.
A weird outcome I agree.
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.
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...
[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/16/month-medical-o...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/julian-assange-went-after-a-fo...
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.
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?
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.
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.
By the way, I don’t believe such an action is the right way to make change, I just think that it’s a very privileged position to take that most people have something to lose by the demolition of our current institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilien_Robespierre
Agree that the medium (no pun intended) is suboptimal for the message.
That said, I more or less agree with you that the person who wrote all this is probably a loony; DDOSing a hospital is not something sane people do.
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.
> 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.
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.
[EDIT:] To be clear, I don't particularly believe or disbelieve any particular allegation in TFA. This is just an observation about comments ITT and how they echo comments in every thread about how we little unimportant people have overstepped our bounds.
And if he indeed only disrupted a fundraising event rather than the hospital operation it could be a serious miscarriage of justice (with complicity from the news outlets who described it as such if this was amenable to fact checking), but this should be argued by lawyers familiar with the case because PR-wise he has very little going for him.
Patient dieing on the bed and need to access their MRI scan from another hospital? Nope.
Marty was (and I'm sure still is) incredibly arrogant. As the FBI got closer and closer to catching him, he would continually make up different stories about how "Anonymous" was doing all of this, etc. etc. After confronting him with irrefutable evidence, he made claims about large botnets he controlled, and other various crimes. His goal immediately shifted from completely innocent to criminal mastermind (again, huge arrogance)
After being caught (which he was 100% certain would never happen), he attempted to flee the country by boat with his wife, almost died, and was picked up by a cruise ship.
He is not a physically abusive guy, but something is not mentally 100% with him. He had an ok IT consultant career before all of this, but he very much assumed he was smarter than everyone else.
Edit: Also not surprised about his outrageous claims of secret prisons, toxic water, etc. This is just what the guy does, bullshits and makes stuff up. He probably actually believes what he is saying (again, mentally off).
I was tangentially involved in his case, most of what I wrote is based on first and second hand knowledge. I have also personally met him a few times.
People in this state very much take for granted that the administrative portion of government is competent and knows what it's doing. Government here is generally competent but there are many pockets of incompetent political appointees and totally under-resourced teams and there's no way of telling which is which from the outside. People also take as fact the word of big important prestigious organizations that are experts in what they do (and with good reason, they are usually right). BCH and similar may be experts as a whole and government may be competent in general but these institutions are made up of people and people aren't perfect and they get things wrong sometimes. Someone at BCH clearly made the wrong call. That wrong call got plopped on the desk of some overworked bureaucrat who takes it at face value because they're overworked and they're experts so why not trust them, they made the wrong call. So then the next person at BCH sees in this girl's file that she came in for X, got referred to the state, the state took her from her parents and that influences how they treat her going forward. This goes on and you get a heck of a feedback loop because everyone is just content to assume that the state and the experts know best and the parents are just whining about it. Nobody is in a position to evaluate the big picture and even if they do how do you stop the loop and say "hey wait, this looks wrong". I could fill a novel with all the sob stories like this that I know though most of them relate to drug addicts and the elderly so they wouldn't tug a heartstrings nearly as much as this story does. The culture of the state simply does not equip people in "the system" (both the government and private institutions like BCH) to doubt or re-evaluate the prior results of the system and the conditions of the state bureaucracy are not sufficient for the bureaucrats to reliably make the right calls the first (and often only) time around. It's sad but it is what it is. This is a complex problem that many societies grapple with and not the kind of thing any individual can change on their own.
Regarding Martin Gottesfeld, I am not informed enough to comment.
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.
However, this is a hospital, imagine if the DOS somehow would of contributed to a death.
He is serving federal, not state, prison time. “Parole out after a few” only applies to state prison.
There is no federal parole system, prisoners who get good behavior credits can reduce their sentence by 15% though. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-sy...
I would take everything Mr. Gottesfeld communicates with a grain of salt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.