The conviction of computer programmer Andrew Auernheimer was recently overturned by an appeals court on Friday on the basis of a technicality. According to a written opinion by 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals judge Michael Chagares, Auernheimer should have never been tried in New Jersey for his supposed crimes. Prior to the overturning of his conviction, Auernheimer was found guilty of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as identity fraud in a New Jersey federal court, and was subsequently sentences to serve a 41-month sentence in prison, The Hollywood Reporter said.
Auernheimer's crimes were reportedly spurred from his curiosity shared by another individual named Daniel Spitler, who contacted him in 2010 about the purportedly security flaw in Apple's mobile operating system. Although Spitler did not own an iPad, he reportedly bought an iPad SIM card for the installation of another device in order to take advantage of AT&T's then-unlimited cellular data plan, which only cost $30 monthly.
THR said Auernheimer, who met Spitler in a chat room online, helped the latter refine a program to expose Apple's security flaw, which was found that by changing the digits of the IDs tied to iPad user email addresses, hackers could pull new ones. The process Auernheimer helped refined is called an account slurper, THR added.
The automated program led to the collection of 114,000 email addresses in a span of four days, of which the two immediately contacted the media, including a Gawker reporter who wrote an article titled "Apple's Worst Security Breach."
Chagares rejected a trial judge's basis of Auernheimer's conviction, and said, "Venue in criminal cases is more than a technicality; it involves 'matters that touch closely the fair administration of criminal justice and public confidence in it.' This is especially true of computer crimes in the era of mass interconnectivity."
