<nettime> IS MAFIABOY REAL OR A CREATION OF THE MEDIA? 2600.com

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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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