Many were shocked to hear on Tuesday that one of the most notorious hackers of recent times, LulzSec's Hector Monsegur – a man with cyber crimes dating back years – received for his efforts a sentence of time served, plus a year of probation, after almost three years of "extraordinary cooperation" with the FBI.

His punishment ranks as the least severe handed to parties involved with LulzSec, which includes the 20-month suspended sentence and 300 hours of community service given to the then-16-year-old Mustafa Al-Bassam in the UK. And it looks especially minimal when compared the recent 10-year prison sentence handed to Jeremy Hammond by the US government for his role in the breach of private intelligence firm Stratfor. Both men were, like me, convicted in part because of Monsegur's cooperation with law enforcement.

However, if we take a closer look at the landscape of the internet age in the eyes of the law, this sentence should come as no surprise.

Internet culture has greatly perplexed global law enforcement – from the sudden surge in hacktivist collectives to the bizarre language of the deep web. The last few years have almost certainly presented a steep learning curve to otherwise experienced police detectives, requiring them to learn words like "doxxing" and "mudkipz" on top of understanding the differences between various types of online communication (from Jabber to Internet Relay Chat, and from private forums to Snapchat).

But one of the most challenging aspects of battling "cyber crime" is convincingly linking online aliases to real people. When basic IP traces lead to dead ends, what is the next logical step for investigators?



The case against myself and others in the UK presented untold technical difficulties to our legal representation, the police and the prosecution. Building a case for or against a group of hackers is a daunting task when, on top of the reality that no similar legal cases could be used as reference (since none existed), even the evidence itself was wrapped in several layers of jargon.

Perhaps the nearest thing to coherent documentation in the cases in which Monsegur cooperated came in the form of thousands of poorly-scanned, black-and-white screenshots of chatroom conversations (which had been actively recorded by the FBI through Monsegur's computer). These chat logs, which were disclosed to us defendants and our legal teams almost a year after our arrest, became the key focus of the investigation, shaping arguments for all parties.



Without such tangible pieces of evidence – which usually only get brought to the table via informants – modern cyber crime cases would become incomprehensible to judges and juries, and often impossible to succesfully prosecute.

In Monsegur, the FBI found the solution to three core problems of prosecuting cybercrimes:

finding a source of vast, up-to-date Internet knowledge to explain and translate for authorities;

procuring a means of actively incriminating (and providing evidence against) other hackers whose private communications would otherwise be highly difficult to pin down;

and, most importantly, finding a way to put out the message to others in the community that, if they choose to cooperate with investigators, and do so in a way that provides substantial assistance to them, they will be rewarded – which, in turn, helps to solve their first two problems.



As agencies like the FBI get a better grasp on internet culture and show more interest in staying one step ahead of it, Monsegur's sentencing will no doubt lead future hackers facing prosecution to whisper a simple question to their lawyers:

Can you get me a deal like Sabu?

