[Nettime-bold] IS MAFIABOY REAL OR A CREATION OF THE MEDIA? 2600.com

[rdom@thing.net]

IS MAFIABOY REAL OR A CREATION OF THE MEDIA?

                                   04/20/00

We'd like to officially express our skepticism
on the recent arrest of a Montreal teenager for
the Denial of Service attacks back in February.
Naturally, we always have reason to be somewhat
doubtful whenever the authorities claim to know
the first thing about the Internet. But in this
case, we wanted to see just how clueless they
could possibly be. When the name "mafiaboy" was
 first mentioned months ago, a couple of us
 hopped onto IRC using that nick. Sure enough,
within seconds, we were being messaged by people
who believed we were the person responsible.
Amazingly, the person who fell for it the
 hardest is the very person now being quoted
widely in the media as having caught the
perpetrator. Now perhaps this is all just a big
coincidence. But as you can see from the IRC
 logs below, we dropped a few clues that the
person was in a country with snow and at one
point "accidentally" spoke French to imply the
province of Quebec. We were amazed when the
 blame actually landed on someone from Montreal.

A good question to ask is why we would want to
cause such confusion and mayhem. The answer is
 to prove a point. That all one needs to do to be
considered a suspect is change a nickname on
 IRC. We had absolutely NO proof that we could
 provide to make this fictitious person
 responsible in any way for the attacks. Yet we
were believed by countless people, including the
 "expert" who is taking credit for the arrest.
And now we see that the main piece of evidence
against the real person who was arrested is the
 fact that he was "bragging" in an IRC channel.
Please. If this is indeed the person responsible
(and what a geographical coincidence THAT would
 be), we'd like to see them held accountable to a
REASONABLE degree. But in order to do this
 fairly, the evidence must be made public.
Otherwise, we will continue to believe that the
 authorities and the media are more interested in
 sending a message than actually achieving
justice.

To Read IRC Chat and commentary:

http://www.2600.com/news/2000/0420.html



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