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Convicted tax fraudster sues CNBC for defamation, says he's not a "hacker"
Daniel Rigmaiden wants the world to know that, while CNBC's American Greed television show may have portrayed him more than two years ago as a "hacker," a "recluse," and more, he is none of those things.
Earlier this year, Rigmaiden sued NBCUniversal, CNBC's parent company, and an Arizona Republic journalist shown in that episode, accusing them all of defamation.
Rigmaiden wants unspecified damages and also a permanent injunction that would stop further distribution of the episode, which is currently available on Amazon Video for $2.99.
Lawyers for CNBC have tried to get the case dismissed, and the two sides will face off in a Miami-Dade County courthouse on Monday, November 19.
In actuality, Rigmaiden is a man convicted of tax fraud who became a privacy activist—he has become something of an icon in surveillance-law nerd circles.
"Plaintiff did not use black-hat computer hacking to steal money from the IRS," he wrote. "Plaintiff used computer software to automate the process of filing fraudulent tax returns and collecting the refunds. The IRS was not hacked by Plaintiff, and Plaintiff otherwise did not use black-hat computer hacking to facilitate the tax-refund fraud scheme."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday November 25 2018, @03:34PM
... were the BSD Kernel Coders.
Computer criminals regarded said BSD coders as profoundly cool, so they started calling themselves Hackers so _everyone_ would regard computer criminals as profoundly cool.
A half-hearted effort to convinced the media to called them "Crackers" foundered upon the shoals of "Cracker" having been in widespread use for _decades_ as a derogatory term for Southern White Racist. I remained unclear on the distinction between "Cracker" and "Good Old Boy".
It went so quickly so far downhill from there, that at the annual MacHack Conference, they eventually shut what had been a twenty-year tradition for me and my colleagues, as well as an abundant livelihood to the staff who put on the conference each year - mostly in Ann Arbor Michigan, but once in Southfield and once in Detroit.
This because they didn't want Tech employers to call the FBI when their engineers requested the company pay for what was so obviously a computer criminal convention! :-/
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]