If we can appreciate inexplicable medical tragedies - can't we appreciate a mans emotional response? If he was wrong was he yet not caught in a tragedy?

>their information technology infrastructure is unexpectedly cut

You are attributing offence of a kind which is far removed from his case - he never attacked the kind of critical systems which you indicate with the Newyorker article.

He pestered and temporarily disabled a medical company website to highlight the maltreatment of a patient, now he is facing many years in prison for the protest.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-i-knocked-boston-chi...

" I also knew from my career experience as a biotech professional that no patients should be harmed if Boston Children’s was knocked offline. There’s no such thing as an outage-proof network, so hospitals have to be able to function without the Internet. It’s required by federal law, and for accreditation. The only effects would be financial and on BCH’s reputation. "

> He pestered and temporarily disabled a medical company website to highlight the maltreatment of a patient, now he is facing many years in prison for the protest.

Uh, OK...

You'll have to pardon my skepticism that you actually read the New Yorker article when it appears you didn't even read the OP whom you defend. Here's one sentence you appear to have skipped over:

> Almost unbelievably, they kept their donation page on the same public network as the rest of their stuff. Rookie mistake. To take it down, I’d have to knock the whole hospital off the Internet.

Edit: clarification. The thing that I quote directly above is not in the OP, but in the link u/strainer provided as rebuttal, i.e. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-i-knocked-boston-chi...

I did only scan the article which I linked to establish that he never attacked the kind of critical systems you indicated by your link. That was established and only somewhat distracted by your reaching caveat -that he knew his attack would take the whole hospitals websites temporarily offline.

You may think about admonishing u/danso for this - the hunger striker never did attack the kind of critical systems indicated by u/danso's comment and link.

My argument with you is that I don't think we should trust Mr. Gottesfeld's self-serving claim, at face value, that he knew that his attack wouldn't have unintended consequences. He was not an employee at BCH, he did not have inside knowledge about how their systems work, nor does he even appear to have read their incident plan. No one is arguing that a hospital folds over and dies when the Internet goes out; the argument is that a hospital operates suboptimally when under attack. I think it's a bit pretentious for an outsider to argue that crippling "non-critical" systems like appointment and prescription management is no big deal.

But the main reason why I think we should be skeptical of Gottesfeld's professed expertise is...well, the fact that we are discussing him at all. How was Mr. Gottesfeld caught so quickly? If you take Mr. Gottesfeld at his word, it's because the FBI poured thousands/millions into investigating the breach. According to the affidavit, though [0], the reasons for Mr. Gottesfeld capture were:

1. He allegedly posted a video calling for Anonymous to take action against BHC, and this video was posted on a YouTube account attached to Mr. Gottesfeld's identity.

2. He used a Twitter account attached to his name to DM other people about hacking the BHC.

3. He created a separate anonymous Twitter account to tweet about the attack, using an email address connected to his computer.

4. He bragged about the DDOS attack to his friend, who then told the FBI about it.

Since Mr. Gottesfeld, according to the FBI, initially denied his involvement -- and then was caught after he and his wife attempted to flee the country by boat but ended up being rescued, we can't make the argument that Mr. Gottesfeld was sloppy about his personal opsec because he wanted to get caught.

So Mr. Gottesfeld appears to be ignorant of how the Internet can inadvertently be linked to personal computer systems, even when such knowledge and awareness is critical to his immediate, personal well-being. But we're supposed to take his word that he can execute a hack with ninja-like precision on BCH because he happens to be an expert in BCH's systems and IT dependencies?

[0] https://www.scribd.com/doc/299575089/Gottesfeld-Martin-Affid...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbnJyK_54Jo

You argument with me was that I don't adequately read sources and that I made an untrue statement, which was in fact not untrue, and was merely open to adjustment - which all summaries are.

My argument with you, was that you linked critical medical equipment to the accuseds website attack, which you should really be aware cannot be vulnerable to a website attack. Yet I am the one criticised for "not a lie" but "a major mistake ... made in rush to judgement"

I found neither your relevant or over-extended response to my criticism tenable. You appear to be in a rush to prosecute beyond fair assessment. Which is what years of hard prison for a temporary website protest attack that cannot threaten critical equipment presents.

> You argument with me was that I don't adequately read sources and that I made an untrue statement, which was in fact not untrue, and was merely open to adjustment - which all summaries are.

The statement in question:

> He pestered and temporarily disabled a medical company website to highlight the maltreatment of a patient, now he is facing many years in prison for the protest.

Mr. Gottesfeld's own statement:

> Almost unbelievably, they kept their donation page on the same public network as the rest of their stuff. Rookie mistake. To take it down, I’d have to knock the whole hospital off the Internet.

Christ, if that's "not untrue" in your judgment, then I won't hold out hope that you care enough about basic facts to see that even in the many words I've spent in this thread bickering about the topic, I've never stated that I support the prosecution or alleged mistreatment of Mr. Gottesfeld. My opinion has been: I am more ambivalent about this case than I was about what happened to Aaron Swartz [0]. Given how angry Swartz's case made me, me not feeling strongly about Mr. Gottesfeld by comparison does not equate to me supporting his prosecution.

But I'm not surprised you aren't able to see the distinction, if you don't see the difference between a website and the Internet.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306401

Either you are a master troll, or you need to draw a network diagram. You invoked "horrific, inexplicable tragedies" because "surgeons don't properly wash their hands or mark which limb is meant to be amputated". (Frankly I'm not sure the latter qualifies as "inexplicable".) Hand-washing and limb-marking don't require internet access. If hospitals require non-internet-enabled signs to inform surgeons of these risk factors, those are available at restaurant suppliers. (Well maybe not the limb-marking...)

Life support devices also don't require constant internet access. Diagnostic equipment also doesn't require constant internet access. Local medical procedures do not require internet access. Hospital medical records do not require constant internet access. In fact no life supporting activity requires constant internet access, because designing the system to rely on something that is unreliable would be stupid. Physicians are not stupid.

It is conceivable that telemedicine sessions might have been interrupted, but telemedicine is inappropriate when life is in jeopardy. We could imagine the future invention of remote robotic surgeries that would qualify, but if that were going on it would have been mentioned in the indictment, and also a dedicated and isolated network would have been created. In fact since every federal indictment written includes everything but the kitchen sink, and this indictment mentioned only the customary ridiculous inflated monetary damages, we know that this DDoS attack did not hurt anyone physically.

I don't think that we normal easygoing HN folks would really mind your conceptual mistakes, but the combination of those with the withering scorn you've exhibited here is probably what inspired us to keep this thread going long past the point of interest and utility. So, nice trolling!

Please don't imply that a commenter has not read an article, no matter how apparent it is to you or how obtuse you believe them to be. It does nothing to further the discussion constructively, but rather only increases animosity between participants. Simply pointing out what the article does say in contradiction is strong enough, and any ignorance or otherwise on behalf of the commenter should be apparent in and of itself.

I agree that we should err on the side of civility. But in this case, I think it's important to call out u/strainer for his mistake. Note that I said "mistake" and not "lie", because I do think it was an honest mistake, but a major one that was made in a rush to judgment.

No big deal. Me and u/strainer are just two people opining about things we read on the Internet on a late Monday night. But that's kind of the bigger picture, isn't it? If the allegations against Mr. Gottesfeld are materially true, but we assign the best of motives to him, then he himself is also just another guy who read something on the Internet. Except, instead of just opining about it, he allegedly tried to shut down an entire hospital's IT.

u/strainer wants to believe in the narrative that Mr. Gottesfeld is competent and knowledgeable enough to know how a hospital's IT is configured. I'm of the belief that maybe Mr. Gottesfeld is overconfident of what he knows about hospital IT. And perhaps he was overconfident of the issues regarding the plight of the girl and her family. Because it's easy to miss even the big details when reading things on the Internet.

Dude if anyone here "wants to believe in a narrative" it's got to be you. Gottesfeld's "narrative" is simple. He wanted to interrupt fundraising, so he interrupted fundraising. It's BCH and DoJ that have the complicated yarn to spin, about how torturing little girls is OK and all of their life support equipment relies on constant access to Instagram and the best response to your connection coming under DDoS is to just unhook the damn thing.

You aren't actually being civil, when you pretend that anyone whose argument you have misunderstood is some sort of moron.

I don't believe I ever used the word "moron" to describe someone who purportedly believes that the FBI, Boston Children's Hospital, and the state of Massachusetts conspired to torture a girl in public view. I'm still struggling with how Mr. Gottesfeld both denies that he was behind the attack while describing in extensive detail to the Huffington Post how he did in fact launch the alleged attack.

I guess I'll have to count myself among the simpletons who fail to comprehend Mr. Gottesfeld's simple narrative. I honestly don't feel too bad about that, though. Apparently the two people who care most about Justina, i.e. her parents, don't seem to understand his narrative, either.