Crown hints of plea deal in Mafiaboy hacker case

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.globetechnology.com/archive/gam/News/20001107/UMAFIN.html

TU THANH HA
Tuesday, November 7, 2000

MONTREAL -- Crown and defence lawyers appear to be at odds about
whether a Montreal teenager charged with crippling the Web sites of
CNN, Yahoo, Amazon.com and eBay wants to plead guilty next month.

At a Youth Court appearance yesterday, prosecutor Louis
Miville-Deschnes asked that the case of the teenager, accused of being
a computer hacker known as Mafiaboy, be postponed until Dec. 8 to
"dispose of most of the charges."

The 16-year-old's lead defence lawyer, Yan Romanowski, later denied
that the remarks meant that the youth had agreed to enter a guilty
plea to any of the charges.

"I know these are not my client's instructions," Mr. Romanowski said
in an interview. "What will happen on Dec. 8? In my books, it's still
open."

Mr. Romanowski said the issue of sentencing had come up in previous
discussions between both sides. "There's always talks, but we've never
made any commitment. There was no plea bargaining," he said.

When prosecutors use the phrase "dispose of," it usually means a
guilty plea is expected, one law-enforcement official familiar with
the case, said.

If found guilty, the teenager could face a maximum sentence of two
years in youth detention. The RCMP has said that the public would
expect an exemplary sentence, considering the havoc the teen is
charged with having unleashed.

"He's 16. What kind of example do you want to set?" Mr. Romanowski
argues.

The suspect, who cannot be identified under the Young Offenders Act,
comes from a posh suburb in the western part of the Montreal area.

He faces 66 charges: 12 counts of mischief and 54 counts of
unauthorized access to a computer service.

Both sides would have something to gain by avoiding a trial that is
expected to be long, highly technical and costly.

Someone using the on-line handle Mafiaboy unleashed a series of
denial-of-service attacks in February, in which a user illegally
accessed vast numbers of institutional computers and used them to
flood the targeted Web sites so they couldn't handle legitimate
requests.

The investigation was the most complex probe ever handled by the
specialized-technologies division of the RCMP commercial-crime unit in
Montreal, one police officer said.

Mafiaboy is accused of breaking into computers in 54 different
locations around the world, most of them at universities in the United
States, but also as far away as South Korea.


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