Fergie's Tech Blog

Unconvicted Kiwi Hacker's Partner in Crime Gets Jail Time

Maryclaire Dale writes in The New Zealand Herald:

A federal judge questioned why a white college student, who the FBI says worked with a New Zealand teenager to hijack computers worldwide and who was found with thousands of images of child pornography, was spared a decade-long prison sentence that a black convicted child pornographer faced at the same hearing.

University of Pennsylvania student Ryan Goldstein, 22, was sentenced to three months in prison and five years of probation for a hacking scheme that caused a Penn engineering school server to crash in 2006.

Assistant US Attorney Michael Levy said the decision not to charge Goldstein for the child pornography was appropriate given his extensive cooperation.

Voicing concerns about fairness, the judge took the unusual step of sentencing Goldstein alongside a Philadelphia man, Derrick Williams, who was facing eight to 10 years in prison for child pornography in an unrelated case.

Both men were found with several thousand images of child pornography, and each had copied some of the images, though Williams had also posted about 15 of them on a website, prosecutors said.

The judge said he could not help noting that Williams is black and Goldstein is white.

posted by Fergie @ 10/22/2008 05:52:00 PM