 | This biographical article is written like a résumé .(September 2018) |
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.
He graduated cum laude from Fordham University School of Law in 2006, where he served on the Fordham Law Review. After law school, he practiced complex commercial and securities litigation at Sidley Austin in New York City. [1] He is the Managing Partner of Tor Ekeland Law, PLLC. [2] H
In February 2019, Ekeland became engaged to Carrie Goldberg, an attorney specializing in revenge porn and other sex crimes; they had worked together in a lawsuit against Grindr. [16]
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA) is a United States cybersecurity bill that was enacted in 1986 as an amendment to existing computer fraud law, which had been included in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Prior to computer-specific criminal laws, computer crimes were prosecuted as mail and wire fraud, but the applying law was often insufficient.
In the United States, a district attorney (DA), county attorney, county prosecutor, state's attorney, prosecuting attorney, commonwealth's attorney, state attorney or solicitor is the chief prosecutor or chief law enforcement officer representing a U.S. state in a local government area, typically a county or a group of counties. The exact scope of the office varies by state. Generally, the prosecutor represents the people of the jurisdiction. With the exception of three states, district attorneys are elected, unlike similar roles in other common law jurisdictions.
Jeremy Hammond, alias sup_g, is an American anarchist activist and former computer hacker from Chicago. He founded the computer security training website HackThisSite in 2003. He was first imprisoned over the Protest Warrior hack in 2005 and was later convicted of computer fraud in 2013 for hacking the private intelligence firm Stratfor and releasing data to WikiLeaks, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
A criminal defense lawyer is a lawyer specializing in the defense of individuals and companies charged with criminal activity. Some criminal defense lawyers are privately retained, while others are employed by the various jurisdictions with criminal courts for appointment to represent indigent persons; the latter are generally called public defenders. The terminology is imprecise because each jurisdiction may have different practices with various levels of input from country to country. Some jurisdictions use a rotating system of appointments, with judges appointing a private practice attorney or firm for each case.
United States v. Drew, 259 F.R.D. 449, was an American federal criminal case in which the U.S. government charged Lori Drew with violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) over her alleged cyberbullying of her 13-year-old neighbor, Megan Meier, who had committed suicide. The jury deadlocked on a felony conspiracy count and acquitted Drew of three felony CFAA violations, but found her guilty of lesser included misdemeanor violations; the judge overturned these convictions in response to a subsequent motion for acquittal by Drew.
Andrew Alan Escher Auernheimer, best known by his pseudonym weev, is an American computer hacker and professional Internet troll. Affiliated with the alt-right, he has been described as a neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and antisemitic conspiracy theorist. He has used many aliases when he has contacted the media, but most sources state that his real first name is Andrew.
The Gay Nigger Association of America (GNAA) are an internet trolling group. They targeted several prominent websites and internet personalities including Slashdot, Wikipedia, CNN, Barack Obama, Alex Jones, and prominent members of the blogosphere. They also released software products, and leaked screenshots and information about upcoming operating systems. In addition, they maintained a software repository and a wiki-based site dedicated to internet commentary.
Goatse Security (GoatSec) was a loose-knit, nine-person grey hat hacker group that specialized in uncovering security flaws. It was a division of the anti-blogging Internet trolling organization known as the Gay Nigger Association of America (GNAA). The group derives its name from the Goatse.cx shock site, and it chose "Gaping Holes Exposed" as its slogan. The website has been abandoned without an update since May 2014.
The Sarah Palin email hack occurred on September 16, 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign when vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo! email account was subjected to unauthorized access. The hacker, David Kernell, obtained access to Palin's account by looking up biographical details, such as her high school and birthdate, and using Yahoo!'s account recovery for forgotten passwords. Kernell then posted several pages of Palin's email on 4chan's /b/ board. Kernell, who at the time of the offense was a 20-year-old college student, was the son of longtime Democratic state representative Mike Kernell of Memphis.
In United States of America v. Aaron Swartz, Aaron Swartz, an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist, was prosecuted for multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA), after downloading academic journal articles through the MIT computer network from a source (JSTOR) for which he had an account as a Harvard research fellow. Federal prosecutors eventually charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines plus 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release. Facing trial and the possibility of imprisonment, Swartz committed suicide, and the case was consequently dismissed.
Jason Scott "Jay" Leiderman was an American criminal defense lawyer based in Ventura, California. The Atlantic Magazine called Leiderman the "Hacktivist's Advocate" for his work defending hacker-activists accused of computer crimes, or so-called "Hacktivism" especially people associated with Anonymous. BuzzFeed called Leiderman "The Maserati-Driving Deadhead Lawyer Who Stands Between Hackers And Prison" and stated he was "A medical marijuana and criminal defense lawyer from Southern California [who] has made himself into the country's leading defender of hackers."
The PayPal 14 are a group of defendants allegedly connected with the hacktivist group Anonymous, thirteen of whom pleaded guilty in a San Jose court in California, United States in December 2013, to charges of conspiring to disrupt access to the PayPal payment service. The attempted four-day disruption of PayPal's operations was allegedly in response to PayPal's refusal to process donations to Wau Holland Stiftung's PayPal account set up to collect funds for WikiLeaks, and was part of a wider Anonymous campaign, Operation Payback.
Marcia Clare Hofmann is an American attorney and US-UK Fulbright Scholar. Hofmann is known for her work as an advocate of electronic privacy and free expression, including defending individuals charged with high-profile computer crimes, such as Marcus Hutchins and Weev.
Playpen was a notorious darknet child pornography website that operated from August 2014 to March 2015. The website operated through the Tor network which allowed users to use the website anonymously. After running the website for 6 months, the website owner Steven W. Chase was captured by the FBI. After his capture, the FBI continued to run the website for another 13 days as part of Operation Pacifier.
Christopher Charles Cantwell, also known as the Crying Nazi, is an American white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and antisemitic conspiracy theorist.
Marina Medvin is an American criminal defense attorney located in Alexandria, Virginia.
The Special Counsel investigation was a United States law enforcement and counterintelligence investigation of the Russian government's efforts to interfere in United States politics and any possible involvement by members of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. It was primarily focused on the 2016 presidential election.
Joshua Adam Schulte is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who was convicted of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks published the documents as Vault 7, which The New York Times called "the largest loss of classified documents in the agency's history and a huge embarrassment for C.I.A. officials." After his conviction, the Department of Justice called it "one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history."
Michael A. Sussmann is an American former federal prosecutor and a former partner at the law firm Perkins Coie, who focused on privacy and cybersecurity law. Sussmann represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and retained CrowdStrike to examine its servers after two Russian hacker groups penetrated DNC networks and stole information during the 2016 U.S. elections.
Rodney Joffe is a South African/American entrepreneur and cybersecurity expert. He is a recipient of the FBI's Director's Award for Outstanding Cyber Investigation for his role in uncovering the Mariposa botnet.
Not every hacker victim of prosecutorial overreach will win the attention of a pro bono lawyer, either. "I feel sorry for all the people that don't have the support that Fidel had," says Ekeland. "There are a ton of Fidel Salinases out there that aren't as lucky."