Previously: Alleged Epilepsy-Triggering Troll Arrested by the FBI.
The man accused of triggering an epileptic seizure by tweeting was caught when authorities obtained phone records and access to an iCloud account:
Court documents show that a search warrant to Twitter concerning the @jew_goldstein handle provided the authorities with information that the account was created on December 11 with a "PhoneDevice." Twitter also divulged the device's phone number and said that the carrier was AT&T. Some of the direct messages to other Twitter users on the account, according to the documents, said, "I know he has epilepsy," "I hope this sends him into a seizure," and "...let's see if he dies." The Dallas authorities next obtained information from AT&T that the telephone number used to start the Twitter account was a burner SIM card with a Tracfone prepaid account "with no subscriber information." "However, a review of the AT&T toll records showed an associated Apple iPhone 6A Model 1586 (Apple iPhone)," Nathan Hopp, an FBI agent in Dallas, wrote in the criminal complaint (PDF).
The police then sent a search warrant to Apple "for the iCloud account associated to the telephone number" used to open the Twitter account. Apple provided a wealth of information that ultimately doomed Rivello. Cupertino gave the Dallas Police Department his Apple ID e-mail address, his name, home address, and registration IP address when the account was created in 2012.
John Rayne Rivello has been charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon "enhanced as a hate crime". One of the images obtained from the iCloud account included an image of Rivello posing with his driver's license. The animated GIF that Rivello allegedly tweeted was a generic one that had already been posted on places such as 4chan for years.
Related Stories
Three months after a journalist reported being attacked by a troll who posted a seizure-inducing image on Twitter, a suspect has been arrested:
A man accused of triggering an epileptic seizure of senior Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald through a tweet was arrested by the FBI on Friday morning. An FBI spokesman said the name of the suspect has not been released but confirmed that an arrest was made, Dallas News reported.
The arrest comes three months after Eichenwald said he suffered a seizure after someone sent him a video clip of a flashing strobe light in an intentional effort to trigger his epilepsy. A Twitter account called @jew_goldstein — which has since been suspended — responded to Eichenwald with a gif of flashing strobe lights and a message: "You deserve a seizure for that post." Shortly after, Eichenwald's account tweeted: "This is his wife, you caused a seizure. I have your information and have called the police to report the assault."
From the Dallas News article:
The agency announced that John Rayne Rivello, 29, of Salisbury, Md., was arrested Friday morning in Maryland on a cyberstalking charge.
[...] Eichenwald's attorney, Steven Liberman, told Newsweek that "What Mr. Rivello did with his Twitter message was no different from someone sending a bomb in the mail or sending an envelope filled with anthrax spores."
[...] According to a criminal complaint, messages sent from Rivello's Twitter account mentioned Eichenwald, saying "I know he has epilepsy," "I hope this sends him into a seizure" and "let's see if he dies."
Authorities also found an screenshot of Eichenwald's Wikipedia page on Rivello's iCloud account, the criminal complaint said, altered to list his date of death as Dec. 16, 2016. Other files on the iCloud account include a list of things that trigger epileptic seizures and a screenshot of a Dallas Observer article about Eichenwald's attempts to find the person who tweeted at him.
[...] On Friday, Eichenwald said that more than 40 people sent him strobes once they found out that they could trigger seizures.
The Telegraph reports on work published in Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.03.076) in which researchers
[...] propose that a risk factor for seizures in patients with photosensitive epilepsy is engagement of the circuitry that produces gamma oscillations.
Gamma oscillations are brain waves that oscillate at frequencies in the 30 to 80 Hz range. One researcher told the Telegraph:
Our findings imply that in designing buildings, it may be important to avoid the types of visual patterns that can activate this circuit and cause discomfort, migraines, or seizures [...] Even perfectly healthy people may feel modest discomfort from the images that are most likely to trigger seizures in photosensitive epilepsy.
Related stories:
Migraine, Epilepsy Drug Caused Serious Birth Defects in Thousands of French Children
Epilepsy-Triggering Suspect Charged, More Details on the Arrest
Alleged Epilepsy-Triggering Troll Arrested by the FBI
Epilepsy Patient Assaulted Via Twitter
Easing Epilepsy With Battery Power
Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, has died
From The Verge
Stephen Wilhite, one of the lead inventors of the GIF, died last week from COVID at the age of 74, according to his wife, Kathaleen, who spoke to The Verge. He was surrounded by family when he passed. His obituary page notes that "even with all his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind, and good man."
Stephen Wilhite worked on GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, which is now used for reactions, messages, and jokes, while employed at CompuServe in the 1980s. He retired around the early 2000s and spent his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @11:52PM (3 children)
This case is really shaking things up.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @12:09AM (2 children)
Not too soon. Just not good enough. -1
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Friday March 24 2017, @12:22AM (1 child)
Almost made the first bad pun, but I was biting my tongue.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @12:23AM
Triggered?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @12:29AM
It also has "I hope you have a seizure" written in text, was initially presented as a still image and required the recipient to click on it in order to display as an animation. While the intent was clear, the victims story in this case is about as dubious as his reporting. [youtube.com]
I sure hope the defence lawyers "just let him answer their questions".
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @12:59AM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday March 24 2017, @02:36AM (6 children)
The first one we should be observing is the InfoSec angle. Guy used a burner phone. Didn't help. Keep that in mind next article extolling BitCoin, Tor, VPNs, SSL everything, blah blah. You have to have iron discipline and if the Feds want you even that probably ain't saving you. There is a world of difference between secure enough to keep your boss/spouse/local LEOs, etc. off of your trail and the infosec tools and tradecraft required to stop the Feds. And the game jumps up several more levels if you want to act online and stop the spooks from knowing who did it.
Another lesson is when two people who are total dicks meet on social media, there are no winners.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @03:29AM (5 children)
He used his real name and address for itunes. And WTF was that driver license picture idiocy?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday March 24 2017, @03:55AM (4 children)
For obvious reasons they aren't giving details. Like how an iPhone got into the picture. Did he think he just needed the burner to sign up for Twitter initially and then did his day to day activity on the iPhone? If so that was major league dumb. But we just don't know. He could have only signed into his iCloud account to get the image and they tracked back through that to the iPhone. Either way, normals shouldn't be encouraged to think they can evade the system, period.
I wouldn't even try unless I was willing to invest the time to build up an entirely new identity with zero possibility to interact with anyone from this reality. Meaning a VM that had safety features to prevent it ever connecting to anything but the VPN leading to a second VPN, both in different countries outside the reach of both the U.S. and Echelon. Twitter and Facebook would both be problems, a burner bought and used for initial account creation in a far away city, then all future use through the VM + VPN might get Twitter safely but I'd have to dig more. A fake/stolen identity from the dark parts of the net might get into facebook. What I still haven't figured out is paying for things as a ghost. Anyone who thinks Bitcoin is the answer hasn't looked at how it actually works. This is why I just use my real name, so I will always be reminded that the account IS traceable; all that crap is just too damned much work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @05:47AM (3 children)
Bitcoin should actually work, so long as you mine it on your ghost VM, and you accept that multiple expenditures by your ghost identity can be linked to each other. Mining bitcoin on CPU (VM or not) is hardly profitable, but it's not unreasonable as a way to convert dollars (spent on electric bill) to bitcoins, with good secrecy but lousy exchange ratio.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday March 24 2017, @04:30PM (2 children)
Math. BTC is currently over $1000 and is 'uneconomical' to mine on standard Intel/AMD devices. Do you know how long it would take a single CPU to consume $1000USD of electricity at the $0.11 rate I pay? And finding a coin is a binary thing, you throw the electricity at it and maybe you find one and maybe you don't, it is only when you mine vast tracts of the problem space that the statistical probabilities assure you of a return on your investment. So add in a computing cluster and an upgrade to commercial power service to the cost of going ghost. And again, this is to raise funds that must always be spent online in ways with zero connection back to meat space. Impractical unless you have something to hide. The PC wars were getting hot enough I was worrying about being the target of a twitter rage mob but that problem should be abating soon, at least for a few years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @12:19AM (1 child)
Math. BTC is currently over $1000 and is 'uneconomical' to mine on standard Intel/AMD devices. Do you know how long it would take a single CPU to consume $1000USD of electricity at the $0.11 rate I pay? And finding a coin is a binary thing, you throw the electricity at it and maybe you find one and maybe you don't, it is only when you mine vast tracts of the problem space that the statistical probabilities assure you of a return on your investment.
Yeah, but mining pools exist to solve exactly that problem, in exchange for skimming their percentage off the top.
It's still a pretty ridiculous effort unless you have something serious to hide, but it's not completely impractical with a single powerful PC. And it still beats any other option I can think of for getting untraceable funds in the hands of a ghost identity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @06:06AM
If custom ASICs beat out GPUs at mining in gigahashes/$, then the home users in the pool lose out even if they have good price-performance GPUs.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @04:41AM (1 child)
so, if I shoot somebody with a gun who has not been known to harm anyone when used on a boatload of people, I am still taken seriously?
This story is suspect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @06:06AM
You are trying to argue with a fact. You are suspect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @05:06AM (3 children)
Photosensitive epilepsy isn't terribly common. Mine is triggered by boredom. (Honest.) I keep aksing for special accommodations, but people keep sending me boring shit.
(Score: 1) by Demena on Friday March 24 2017, @06:31AM (1 child)
That's not epilepsy, that's a tantrum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @10:14AM
I used to get those all the time when I was a kid. I would get so bored that I would literally start kicking, screaming, rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, etc.
Same kind a tantrum a cat would throw if it wanted down and you did not put it down.
Usually happened in Church.
My dad broke me of it, but it wasn't easy. On him or on me.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @02:02PM
And you're hanging out here?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @06:07AM (6 children)
Let's just get this out of the way: I don't condone this jerks actions, but... I also don't think it's in our best interests if the legal system is able to set the precedent that sending a person who has epilepsy a flashy GIF image is a form of assault; regardless of the sender's intentions. It seems like this is one of those proverbial slippery slopes that will be abused... Thoughts?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @06:55AM
I don't mind as long as the precedent is they still have to be able to prove you already knew there's a high chance of causing harm to your specific target and that was why you sent that particular image to him.
And all that seems to be the case. So I'm fine with such stuff as being classified as assault as long as that's the reasoning given.
An epileptic fit could probably cause as much damage as someone slapping or even punching your face: http://www.epilepsy.com/article/2014/3/meeting-news-do-seizures-damage-brain [epilepsy.com]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1783429/ [nih.gov]
So yeah, assault. You could try to say the guy is weak so that's his problem, but if you know someone is severely allergic to something and you sent allergens to him so that he might get injured or even die, it's assault (and maybe murder). Whereas if you didn't know, and a reasonable person in your position wouldn't know, and you sent him stuff and he dies you're not normally convicted for murder or assault. You'd probably still be investigated first to see if maybe you actually knew and intentionally did it.
Of course his family might still file a civil suit against you even if the State considers you innocent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Friday March 24 2017, @01:01PM
Since the sender clearly considered it a form of assault (based on his comments surrounding his action) and we know it had the potential to act as one in this case, I see no reason why we shouldn't treat it as one. Also based on surrounding comments, we know there was malice.
Had any of those elements been missing an assault charge might have been too much but in this case I think it's entirely appropriate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @02:43PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @06:17PM (2 children)
What if I know someone has a severe anger problem and are likely to erupt if I say the right words to trigger them? Is posting a comment with the intention of evoking an excessive emotional responses now going to be considered assault? If so then which other mental/psychological conditions are we going to add to this new class? The guy didn't touch the victim. He didn't send him something physical that could trigger an allergic reaction (like the peanut example). He sent data. If there had been no seizure would we still be discussing this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @01:33PM
Depends, if such a condition is actually medically recognised, the way that fellow’s epilepsy is. Epilepsy is not a notional condition the way your anger problem is. The onus will then be on that person with the anger problem to prove that they have this condition and that you did exactly what was necessary to trigger it, causing them significant physical harm, with malice aforethought in doing so.
The only mental/psychological conditions we are going to add are those that are actually recognised by modern scientific medicine. Doesn’t matter if he didn’t touch the victim, and yes, he “only” sent data, but this data was interpreted by his physical computer to show him something that could demonstrably cause him harm. And yes, had there been no seizure, then we wouldn’t be discussing this at all. The whole point is that someone had intentionally, and with malice aforethought, did something that caused him to trigger a seizure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @01:36PM
Yeah, so if you had one of those hackable pacemakers [soylentnews.org] that we’ve been hearing about and I hack your pacemaker and it kills you, under that same theory I’m not guilty of murder. I didn’t touch you. I didn’t send you anything physical. I sent you data.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @07:58AM
What did he post? An ad?