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The whole "goatse" thing is part of the performance art. Hacker groups have a long history of over the top stuff like that -- look at the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), Phone Losers of America, Legion of Doom, etc.

weev is a troll (in the 4chan sense), and a performance artist, but on this issue, he's actually being pretty straight up. He got some information about a security vulnerability, was asked to publicize it, did so, and is now being unlawfully screwed for it.

Was what he did prudent, especially for someone already on the FBI shitlist? No. Was it lawful? Yes. And, it certainly brought the security vulnerability, which was an incompetent decision by ATT, to public attention.

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There's also a long history of cranks falsely claiming that their rights are being violated and that due process in their case is being trampled.

I'm not saying that that cranks shouldn't be defended when their rights are violated or that his claims are false. But he's certainly not helping his credibility with his disorganized, rambling writing, and his juvenile website, etc. It makes it so that my immediate inclination reading this is to suspect that most of it is wildly exaggerated.

Don't know why you're being downvoted (I upvoted you), but I had the same thought and impression as you did.

weev talking about "this is not the first time" -- that whole section should have been left out. That makes it very conspiracy theory-like, and really has no bearing on what's going on now.

I agree -- he has definitely not helped his credibility in defending himself from some "fruit of the poisonous tree" drug charges resulting from an illegal search warrant.

There is a reason why test cases usually find really unambiguously "safe" people for the test case -- e.g. the elderly, unambiguously law abiding and moral, African American gentleman in Chicago used for the recent 2A case McDonald vs. Chicago, or the same with Heller vs. DC.

I am pretty sure no one expected search warrants when this all started. If it was expected that the FBI and local law enforcement would get involved, an academic security researcher would have been a far better spokesman.