One of two men charged with stealing more than 100,000 e-mail addresses of Apple iPad users remained jailed Wednesday after making his first court appearance in New Jersey.
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Andrew Auernheimer, wearing handcuffs and a prison jumpsuit, chatted and joked with court personnel before the brief hearing in front of U.S. Magistrate Patty Shwartz, who scheduled a bail hearing for next week. Auernheimer didn’t enter a plea.
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Auernheimer was arrested in Fayetteville, Arkansas, last month and extradited to New Jersey, where he and San Francisco resident Daniel Spitler face one count each of fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization. Spitler was released on $50,000 bail in January. The case is being prosecuted in New Jersey because the state is home to about 16,000 of the iPad users.
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Both counts carry a five-year maximum prison sentence.
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Authorities say the two men, both in their mid-20s, were part of an online group that tricked ATT’s Web site into giving the e-mail addresses, allegedly including those of celebrities like film mogul Harvey Weinstein and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
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The group, Goatse Security, described by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as a loose association of Internet hackers, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press last month that Spitler and Auernheimer did nothing wrong and were acting in the public interest by exposing a flaw in ATT’s security system.
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U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman has said there is no evidence the men used the swiped information for criminal purposes but that it could have wound up in the hands of spammers and scam artists.
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In online chats excerpted in the criminal complaint, the members of the group seem to be concerned about the possible consequences of their actions, particularly regarding whether anyone in the group notified ATT about the breach.
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you DID call tech support right? a user nicknamed Nstyr asks.
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totally…