



Mozilla issued a friend of the court testimony asking the United States Department of Justice to reconsider Auernheimer's conviction. Auernheimer, aka Weez was convicted and subsequently sentenced to 41 months in prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr filed an appeal on behalf of Auernheimer earlier this month imploring the Justice Department to vacate the conviction and free the hacker from behind bars, where he has been held at times in solitary confinement since starting his sentence this past March. Now in the wake of a separate amicus brief filed by a team of computer experts weeks earlier, the Mozilla Foundation has authored a statement of their own in support of Auernheimer.According to RT , prosecutors said Auernheimer violated the CFAA because a computer program he operated helped him uncover the email addresses of around 114,000 Apple iPad owners due to a security lapse that left valuable user data hosted on the servers of telecom company AT&T free for the taking.“AT&T chose not to employ passwords or any other protective measures to control access to the email addresses of its customers,” attorneys wrote in the appeal earlier this month. “The company configured its servers to make the information available to everyone and thereby authorized the general public to view the information. Accessing the email addresses through AT&T’s public website was authorized under the CFAA and therefore was not a crime.”Now on the heels of the brief filed by professional security researchers, Mozilla is asking the Justice Department to do something about what they say is an unjust conviction.“The outdated law has been abused to cover situations far removed from the type of criminal hacking Congress had in mind when it passed the law in 1986,” EFF staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury told Wired earlier this month.Indeed, Mozilla argued in their brief that Auernheimer and his co-defendant, Daniel Spitler, “did not avoid any password requirement, decrypt any encrypted data, access any private accounts or cause the AT&T website to malfunction.”“I’m going to prison for arithmetic,” Auernheimer said before his sentencing.According to Mozilla, prosecuting Auernheimer for finding data stored openly on the Web presents a way for the government to go after even the most novice computer users simply for typing random addresses into a browser. In the brief, Granick even acknowledged that changing a single integer in the website for the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s homepage can return results that would, by some interpretations, warrant a conviction.“Many individual users modify web requests by typing new values in the browser address bar. Changing these values is useful when navigating through online photo albums or reading through comment threads for online forums. Doing so is technologically identical to what Auernheimer and his co-defendant did,” the brief reads.