Hacker Claims Feds Hit Him With 44 Felonies When He Refused to Be an FBI Spy

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/hacker-claims-feds-hit-44-felonies-refused-fbi-spy/

By Andy Greenberg
Threat Level
Wired.com
02.18.15

A year ago, the Department of Justice threatened to put Fidel Salinas in 
prison for the rest of his life for hacking crimes. But before the federal 
government brought those charges against him, Salinas now says, it tried a 
different tactic: recruiting him.

A Southern District of Texas judge sentenced Salinas earlier this month to 
six months in prison and a $10,600 fine after he pleaded guilty to a 
misdemeanor count of computer fraud and abuse. The charge stemmed from his 
repeatedly scanning the local Hidalgo County website for vulnerabilities 
in early 2012. But just months before he took that plea, the 28-year-old 
with ties to the hacktivist group Anonymous instead faced 44 felony 
hacking and cyberstalking charges, all of which were later dismissed. And 
now that his case is over, Salinas is willing to say why he believes he 
faced that overwhelming list of empty charges. As he tells it, two FBI 
agents asked him to hack targets on the bureau’s behalf, and he refused.

Over the course of a six-hour FBI interrogation in May, 2013, months after 
his arrest, Salinas says two agents from the FBI’s Southern District of 
Texas office asked him to use his skills to gather information on Mexican 
drug cartels and local government figures accepting bribes from drug 
traffickers. “They asked me to gather information on elected officials, 
cartel members, anyone I could get data from that would help them out,” 
Salinas told WIRED in a phone interview before his sentencing. “I told 
them no.”

“Fundamentally this represents the FBI trying to recruit by indictment,” 
says Salinas’ lawyer Tor Ekeland, who took the case pro bono last year. 
“The message was clear: If he had agreed to help them, they would have 
dropped the charges in a second.”

[...]

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