[ISN] Hacktivist's Advocate: Meet the Lawyer Who Defends Anonymous

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/10/hacktivists-advocate-meet-the-lawyer-who-defends-anonymous/263202/

By Luke Allnutt
The Atlantic
Oct 3, 2012

As a lawyer not particularly immersed in the technology world, Jay 
Leiderman first became interested in the hacker collective Anonymous 
around December 2010. That was when Anonymous activists launched 
distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) against Mastercard and 
PayPal, who stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks.

Since then, he has represented a number of high-profile hackers, 
including Commander X, who is on the run from the FBI for a DDoS attack 
on a county website in Santa Cruz, California, to protest a ban on 
public sleeping, and Raynaldo Rivera, a suspected hacker from LulzSec 
who is accused of stealing information from Sony computer systems. Both 
Commander X and Rivera could face up to 15 years in prison.

Leiderman, who represents many of his hacker clients pro bono, argues 
that the law should be changed on DDoS. In an interview I conducted with 
Leiderman recently, he told me why slapping teenaged hackers with harsh 
prison sentences is counterproductive.


How did you first become involved with representing Anonymous?

The politics of it spoke to me and the fact that it was a newly emerging 
area of law really spoke to me. My partner and I do a lot of medical 
marijuana law. Primary among the reasons that we do that are that it's 
new and emerging so we can help shape the way that the law ultimately 
fits society. And because we believe in the politics behind it. And it's 
the exact same with Anonymous.

We have an opportunity here to make the courts, as these cases wind 
their way up, understand privacy issues, emerging tech issues, against 
the backdrop of civil rights and through the prism of free information. 
And that was something that was just an amazing opportunity for me and 
something that still engages me as I continue to take on these cases.

[...]


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