Authorities caught up with another infamous hacker this week, this time the guy who hacked Miley Cyrus’ email account. Interestingly, he wasn’t arrested or charged with anything. Josh Holly,19, did lose three computers to the FBI though, who located him in Murfreesboro, TN.
miley Cyrus
Vocal ArtistAfter snagging some suggestive—but not lewd, nude or vulgar—photos of then 15 Cyrus from her email account, Holly attempted to sell the photos to entertainment media outlets. Due to how he obtained them, he had no takers.
Holly posted the pics on the Internet and predicted the authorities would never find him. One would think karma would see him in jail, rather than the punishment of losing computers and being “thrown way off guard” by an FBI raid.
Why no charges? That other teenage TN hacker that broke into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account was arrested, right? So was the fellow that hacked Scientology sites, right?
The latter two hackers had one thing in common: association with the Internet group Anonymous—digital anarchists the government seems especially keen on putting under its jails. The Palin hacker had the added onus of targeting a VP candidate—which gets the Secret Service involved.
I’ve run into Secret Service guys. Very serious fellows. Can know everything about you, your parents, what elementary school you went to, talk to your old teachers and preachers, and compile a list of your innermost secrets in under 24 hours. Josh Holly, apparently, is no national security threat.
And also, the DOJ’s interpretation of federal email privacy laws makes it hard to prosecute hackers cracking into and accessing already-opened email. That’s based on some fancy lawyering and semantics of defining email. Likely, no national security threat plus difficulty in prosecution is the only thing (so far) that has kept Holly out of jail.
