Wi-Fi hack threat man pleads guilty
US neighbourhood feud turns nasty
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A US man has pleaded guilty to hacking into his neighbour's wireless network before setting up counterfeit webmail accounts in the innocent man's name and sending death threats against the Vice President, Joe Biden.
Barry Vincent Ardolf of Blaine, Minnesota, 45, admitted the crimes two days into his trial.
As part of a plea bargaining agreement, Ardolf admitted possession of child porn, computer hacking, aggravated identity theft, and making death threats.
The middle-aged miscreant also sent email messages to three of his target's co-workers using the counterfeit email address he established. One of these emails contained images of child abuse. For good measure, Ardolf established a MySpace account featuring the same pornographic content.
The Minneapolis-St Paul Star-Tribune has more background on the case, which apparently started after the neighbour complained to the police about Ardolf's inappropriate behaviour towards his four year old son. Ardolf, a former computer technician at Medtronic, took elaborate steps to implicate his neighbour but overstepped himself in sending the executive branch death threat. The neighbour's wireless network was already being closely monitored by private investigators hired by the neighbour.
Ardolf faces a lengthy spell inside for his varied crimes including a mandatory two-year minimum prison sentence on each count of aggravated identity theft and up to five years for sending threatening messages against the Vice President and the computer hacking offences. The distribution of child porn charges carry a tariff of up to 20 years behind bars, though the circumstances of the case would seem to suggest punishment towards the lower end of this scale.
The case was jointly investigated by the FBI-Sponsored Minnesota Cyber Crimes Task Force and the US Secret Service, as a DoJ statement explains. ®
COMMENTS
Lower end?
"The distribution of child porn charges carry a tariff of up to 20 years behind bars though the circumstances of the case would seem to suggest punishment towards the lower end of this scale."
If he was deliberately and maliciously trying to falsely implicate another person for distributing child porn, I would personally expect the punishment to be towards the upper end of the scale.
Life imitating TV? And what's with all these pornography acusations?
I thought it was only in TV dramas that the perpetrators (a favourite word in American cop vocabularies) broke down confessed.
The cops also seem to use 'child pornography' coupled with phrases intended to exaggerate the their extreme nature to besmirch both those charged as well as those convicted of many crimes seeking to confirm in the publics mind the person in question as being despicable.
They even used this technique in connection with the GCHQ decrypter on loan to MI-6 saying they didn't know he was into female fashion design and that he had women's clothes in his closet and, horror of horrors, even visited 'bondage' sites. This guy was the victim of murder - yet they paint him as a bad character.
Actually you get Life for Murder in the UK
Most are let out on licence in the UK because we understand that reabilitation can work, unlike our American Cousins. Never-the-less the licence is for life, these people aren't truely free.
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