Weev's Lawyers Are "Cautiously Optimistic" About His Appeal

Round two of Andrew “weev” Aurenheimer versus the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) starts now.

Aurenheimer is three months into his 41 month prison sentence for violating the CFAA—which he received for exposing AT&T’s poor security—and an appeal to his conviction filed yesterday remains one of his last hopes of getting out before 2016.

Aurenheimer’s trial lawyers, Tor Ekeland and Mark Jaffe, along with Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) internet attorney Marcia Hofmann and law professor Orin Kerr, filed an appeal of the court’s ruling in the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday over what they are calling “an improper conviction and prison sentence.”

In a private message with Motherboard, Ekeland called the brief "strong," but he is only "cautiously optimistic" given the low 5 to 10 percent reversal rate in the appeals process.

The opening brief for the appeal (online here) argues that Aurenheimer “did not violate the CFAA because visiting an unprotected web page is not unauthorized access,” and points out that “AT&T’s hope that the public would not visit its website does not make such visits unauthorized.”

Aurenheimer obtained the private data of 114,000 AT&T customers back in 2010 when he guessed the public URLs the information was stored on. He then passed this information to Gawker. Aurenheimer never used the private information of AT&T’s customers for financial or malicious gain, and Gawker censored the information before printing it. If a crime was committed, it at least appears victimless.

"Auernheimer was aggressively prosecuted for an act that caused little harm and was intended to be—and ultimately was—in the public interest," said Hofmann in an EFF press release on the appeal. The appeal brief also takes aim at AT&T’s claim of Aurenheimer’s stunt costing the company $73,000, stating that the government failed to prove this lost amount during the trial.

Auernheimer’s appeal comes weeks after the introduction of the bipartisan bill Aaron’s Law to Congress by Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Jim Sensenbrenner, and Sen. Ron Wyden.  Aaron’s Law, which seeks to reform the CFAA by properly defining the vague language in the current act including what the words “exceeds authorized access” and “access without authorization” mean, is named after the late Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in January after lengthy legal troubles regarding alleged CFAA violations for stockpiling digital copies of academic journals.