FC: Brian K. West discusses his newspaper "hacking" guilty plea

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

We covered the U.S. vs. Brian K. West case on Politech in six messages in 
August 2001:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02412.html
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02414.html
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02415.html
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02430.html
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02434.html
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02438.html

Basically Brian was prosecuted by the Feds after he alerted the Poteau 
(Oklahoma) Daily News and Sun to security holes in its website. That is not 
in dispute, though the extent to which he looked around the website before 
calling the paper is. In any case, he signed a guilty plea. Brian didn't 
say anything to me on this point, but I suspect strongly he was not helped 
by his wacky defense attorney (Cherie M. Chappell) who sent us a zany note 
at the time urging that Microsoft be criminally prosecuted for security 
holes in Front Page. Anyway, Brian now is able to talk about his case, so 
read on to see what happened.

-Declan

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Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 08:46:08 -0600 (CST)
From: Brian West <brian () bkw org>
To: Declan McCullagh
Subject: Re: Brian K. West story
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.0.20030128014946.0287c090 () zdnet07 zdz cnwk>
Message-ID: <20030128080224.K68223-100000 () daffy bkw org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Declan,
        Thanks for the reply... The fact is I accepted what ever they
offered because I was out of money and out of sanity.  By the time we made
it to court I had already been thru three diffrent anti depressants.  I
lost excessive amouts of weight and was not eating or sleeping.  My
attorney told me that accepting their deal was the best thing to do
because they could paint a very ugly picture to 12 jury memebers(finding
12 people in this area of oklahoma that know anything about the internet
is hard to do) if we went to trial and that I could end up with some time
in jail.  Even though I never broke into anything.  The fact is clnk.com
didn't want competition and they made up alot of stuff.  They never had
plans on selling that stupid 1200 line perl script, which by the way I
could write better code in my sleep.  They had anonymous publishing on
their IIS server turned on and I was nice enough to call the paper and
tell them... a 5yr old with frontpage could have totally rocked their
world.

Please accept my apologies as I get bent out of shape over this.  It makes
my blood boil to know that the DOJ and FBI have this unlimited power to
put people like me in the poor house.  I spent everything I had to fight
them which was a total of $27,000.  When it was all said and done I had to
file bankruptcy.  I couldn't pay my bills.  I lost my car, credit and
sanity in one nice move.

But its all better now.  I see things happen for a reason and what goes
around comes around.  So all the lies that cyberlink told will end up
getting them.  The company I work for has since closed down our Poteau,
Oklahoma market and moved on to bigger better things.  I have started very
slowly in getting back on my feet.  Its been a year since I was sentenced.
I received 3 years probation and $1,000 fine which is already paid off.  I
have a probation officer that never comes to see me.  I'm not allow to own
a gun.  Oh and I can't leave the southeastern portion of Oklahoma without
premission from my probation officer which by the way doesn't ever return
my phone calls and is never in the office.

Oh well i'm gonna stop my babble now.

Thanks,
Brian

---

[Below Brian is referring to the case of U.S. v. Larry Benedict -- Larry is 
facing about four years in prison. --Declan]

Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 10:33:48 -0600 (CST)
From: Brian West <brian () bkw org>
To: Declan McCullagh
Subject: Re: Brian K. West story

Yeah what happened to him was alot worse.  I expect some of these No Net
Theft cases to really drive it on home.  I just want people to know that
what was in the plea wasn't what really happened.  Some people sent really
hateful email to me calling me a theif and saying some really bad things
about me in news groups.  I'm no expert but their are some really nice
content managment scripts out there that work great.  One that comes to
mind is interactivtools.com's Article Manager... Lots of free ones on
freshmeat.  The funny part is pdns.com isn't with clnk anymore.

You can forward this and the above to your mailing list.  Hopefully it
will shed some light on what I was going thru and how I felt.  I really
was only trying to do the right thing and help someone.   My boss stood by
me the whole time because he knew I didn't do anything wrong!

Thanks,
Brian

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