A plea bargain is an agreement in criminal law proceedings, whereby the prosecutor provides a concession to the defendant in exchange for a plea of guilt or nolo contendere. This may mean that the defendant will plead guilty to a less serious charge, or to one of the several charges, in return for the dismissal of other charges; or it may mean that the defendant will plead guilty to the original criminal charge in return for a more lenient sentence.
In law, a plea is a defendant's response to a criminal charge. A defendant may plead guilty or not guilty. Depending on jurisdiction, additional pleas may be available, including nolo contendere, no case to answer, or an Alford plea.
Alan Ralsky was a convicted American fraudster, best known for his activities as a spammer.
A hybrid offence, dual offence, Crown option offence, dual procedure offence, offence triable either way, or wobbler is one of the special class offences in the common law jurisdictions where the case may be prosecuted either summarily or on indictment. In the United States, an alternative misdemeanor/felony offense lists both county jail and state prison as possible punishment, for example, theft. Similarly, a wobblette is a crime that can be charged either as a misdemeanor or an infraction, for example, in California, violating COVID-19 safety precautions.
Robert Alan Soloway is the founder of the so-called "Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam," or SPAMIS, but is said to be one of the Internet's biggest spammers through his company, Newport Internet Marketing (NIM). He was arrested on May 30, 2007, after a grand jury indicted him on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. He was nicknamed the "Spam King" by prosecutors.
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.
On May 9, 2006, Jeanson James Ancheta became the first person to be charged for controlling large numbers of hijacked computers or botnets.
Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) is an open-source network stress testing and denial-of-service attack application written in C#. LOIC was initially developed by Praetox Technologies, however it was later released into the public domain and is currently available on several open-source platforms.
Operation Payback was a coordinated, decentralized group of attacks on high-profile opponents of Internet piracy by Internet activists using the "Anonymous" moniker. Operation Payback started as retaliation to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on torrent sites; piracy proponents then decided to launch DDoS attacks on piracy opponents. The initial reaction snowballed into a wave of attacks on major pro-copyright and anti-piracy organizations, law firms, and individuals. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Pirate Party UK and United States Pirate Party criticised the attacks.
John Dominick Colyandro is a former Senior Advisor and Policy Director for Texas Governor Greg Abbott. He is a former executive director of the Texas Conservative Coalition and the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute. He is also the former executive director of the political action committee Texans for a Republican Majority.
Jake Leslie Davis, best known by his online pseudonym Topiary, is a British hacktivist. He has worked with Anonymous, LulzSec, and other similar groups. He was an associate of the Internet group Anonymous, which has publicly claimed various online attacks, including hacking HBGary, Westboro Baptist Church, and Gawker. They have also claimed responsibility for the defacing of government websites in countries such as Zimbabwe, Syria, Tunisia, Ireland, and Egypt.
In August 2011, a female American high-school student named Savannah Dietrich was sexually assaulted by Will Frey and Austin Zehnder, lacrosse players from Trinity High School, an exclusive Catholic high school in Louisville, Kentucky. The assault was photographed by Frey and Zehnder and other observers, and images and comments from the incident went viral on the internet.
Carmen Milagros Ortiz is an attorney, college instructor, and former United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.
Tor Bernhard Ekeland is a New York City based computer, trial and appellate lawyer. He is best known for representing hackers prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA"), as well as white-collar defendants, in federal criminal court and on appeal across the United States.
On October 21, 2016, three consecutive distributed denial-of-service attacks were launched against the Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn. The attack caused major Internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large swathes of users in Europe and North America. The groups Anonymous and New World Hackers claimed responsibility for the attack, but scant evidence was provided.
Marina Medvin is an American criminal defense attorney located in Alexandria, Virginia.
