Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 25 2018, @04:29PM
Hacking, as I have observed in common usage, is doing anything that most people wouldn't think to do.
Rolling waaaay back to War Games, does dialing every phone number on an exchange looking for modem tone constitute hacking? How about guessing passwords? How is this any different from spam-filing for un-earned tax refunds?
One place I worked dubbed me master hacker for using an open proxy service to bypass the corporate web-filter, hardly felt black-hat to me, but it was effective and nobody else knew how to do it (which is _why_ it was effective....)
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