Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Eric Lundgren Case and Similar High-Profile Plea 'Bargains' (Aaron Swartz and Marcus Hutchins)

Overview



Microsoft's Declaration of War on Recyclers



The Legal Aftermath



Pending review and research




Innocence Is Irrelevant
Reference: Innocence Is Irrelevant



Summary: Unjust and at times fatal plea 'bargain' tricks are being leveraged against people who fight 'the system'; Eric Lundgren has come to realise he's one of these people

The other day we saw Eric Lundgren replying to Marcus Hutchins; it wasn't long after Hutchins had said:

Me: "Now my case is over the stress should subside and i can fina..." My Lawyer: "Just a friendly reminder that you need to pack up your entire apartment, say bye to all your friends, then move across the fucking sea. Sometime this week would be good."


Hutchins will be walking around for the rest of his (long to go!) life with a "felony" crest/emblem/badge/mark/stamp/livery. It's a stain. It'll never go away. It's hard to find employment as in some cases it is not legal to hire people with a conviction/criminal record/felony. He's on the record as admitting guilt only after he had been blackmailed into it with the plea 'bargain' trick/machinations. We mentioned this many times in our daily links over the past couple of years.

“I was watching a documentary called "The Internet's Own Boy - The Story Of Aaron Swartz" - I wish he was still with us... I was glued to the documentary in hopes of gaining some insight that might help my plight. Then the narrator says, "And then he hung himself" and I just sat there dumbfounded...”
      --
Lundgren and Hutchins have that problem in common now. "Before I went to prison," Lundgren told me the other day, "I was watching a documentary called "The Internet's Own Boy - The Story Of Aaron Swartz" - I wish he was still with us..."

"I think I mentioned the similarity to you already," I told him, as "legal bills burdened his family, so he 'saved' them" (by killing himself).

"It was crazy," Lundgren continued, "he got hit with the exact same level of Federal Charges that I was facing and I was so eager to hear how he was going to get out of it! I was glued to the documentary in hopes of gaining some insight that might help my plight. Then the narrator says, "And then he hung himself" and I just sat there dumbfounded..."

And "they do this to other people," I interrupted him to say. "Chelsea Manning is the latest..." (they impose massive daily fines on her and her family for merely refusing to testify against Julian Assange even though she rightly sticks to her Constitutional rights).

"Assange [may] still have some savings," I said, "so I think he can cope with legal bills..."

And "then comes the plea "bargain"," I said. And "the US did this to a Brit too [...] he was released 1-2 weeks ago ("MalwareTech") [...] he has felony now [but] they gave him a "bargain" [of] time served (2 years) [...] after he helped stop the damage caused by Microsoft/NSA back doors (WannaCry)" (this is based on our latest informal conversation).

Here's a report about it, "Marcus Hutchins, malware researcher and ‘WannaCry hero,’ sentenced to supervised release" (NSA and Microsoft officials -- not Hutchins -- should have been sentenced to prison, at the very least for their WannaCry culpability; it's them who made the back doors that caused hospitals to be shut down; their actions actually killed a lot of people).

"How dare this young British man 'interfere' with WannaCry, which was mostly developed by the NSA? Stay out, little fella'! Adults only here!"The above article (from one and a half weeks ago) was written by a former Microsoft UK staffer/intern who had blocked me in Twitter. So it's not likely he'll explain the back doors nature of it all (or Windows). The state wants to 'bury' it all and 'make an example'...

How dare this young British man 'interfere' with WannaCry, which was mostly developed by the NSA? Stay out, little fella'! Adults only here!

WannaCry is an exploit, a back door(ing) facility; it was leaked from the NSA and Microsoft knew about it as it's telling the NSA about zero-days without even fixing them. WannaCry is an SMB-level exploit. It killed lots of people, shut down hospitals worldwide, and caused billions of dollars in financial damage. And guess who was threatened with life in prison for it... the man who stopped it!

“No good deed shall go unpunished, especially if it hurts profit. This world be damned, we'll pollute it if there's a coin to be made outta this.”
      --Anonymous
In the case of Lundgren, who got arrested and was threatened with life behind bars? Not the people responsible for deadly pollution but the person who combats this pollution. As someone put it in response to our article yesterday (Microsoft employees have already 'infiltrated' these comments): "No good deed shall go unpunished, especially if it hurts profit. This world be damned, we'll pollute it if there's a coin to be made outta this."

The following old (but still viral) meme comes to mind as a rather appropriate and apt analogy:

Facebook vs WikiLeaks



There's lots more coming in the series, so stay tuned. The exact structure (outline) hasn't been determined yet. We're thinking along the lines of: 1) Silencing Media (how Microsoft gagged publishers). 2) Court Mischief (how Microsoft possibly 'bought' the outcome). 3) Legal and Financial Ramifications (the dangers of this precedent). Expect photos and legal documents (copies of them).

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

The Slop Industry is Failing So Badly (Mountains of Debt, Losses) That It's Merging With the SPAM Industry
we reckon that Google will eventually delist all slopfarms, recognising they're just a form of SPAM
IBM Starts 2026 a Much Smaller Company (Not Homage to Gerstner)
People who get bluewashed out of their job (or bluewashed into unemployment) are gagged by NDAs
Microsoft XBox Having a "Dog Ate My Homework" Moment: No New Console Until 3 Years From Now... Because "RAM Prices"
Who will ever remember this in 2028? Nobody.
Gemini End of Year Capsules Tally (Based on Lupa) Shows About 10% Growth
What a difference a year makes
Dr. Andy Farnell Explains Why Chatbots Became Dishonesty on Top of Dishonesty (Hiding Usage of Dishonest Salads of Words)
new article from CyberShow
 
Don't "Go Paperless", Go Paperful [sic] (for What Really Matters)
Why should we favour paper use sometimes? Well, many reasons.
Complexity Considered Harmful: We Used to Run an Operating System on 64KB of RAM, Not 64GB of RAM (a Million Times More)
"Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory"
Links 31/12/2025: Cheeto Pushing for More Wars, ‘Security is a Shared Responsibility’
Links for the day
Enshittification of Postal Services Isn't Technological Advancement
Societies that say the aim is to "go digital" and eliminate paper trail aren't advanced; they're moving backwards
XBox is Likely Dead Already, But the Threat It Posed to Us All for Two Decades Isn't Over
"the Xbox was never about gaming and merely served as a test bed for DRM in commodity systems."
Ahead of 2026 Mass Layoffs at Microsoft the Tree Gets Shaken to See Who 'Falls' (Resigns/Retires)
"We had a quiet meeting last week about budget realignment. No one said layoffs, but it’s clear where the focus is shifting."
Almost 6,5000 Pages in 2025, Aiming Higher in 2026
if we can keep focused, then quantity will increase
Gemini Links 31/12/2025: New Resolution, Reverse Hexdump, and Programming Languages
Links for the day
Links 31/12/2025: Nvidia Faces Bubble-Bursting Moment, Saudi Oil Money Pumped Into Chatbots to Keep the Energy Waste Going (Circular Financing Again)
Links for the day
Richard Stallman's First Talk in a U.S. College Since 2018
Greetings from Georgia Tech!
EPO People Power - Part XX - Why António Campinos Chose to Put His Cokehead Friend on 'Sick Leave'
EPO Cocainegate will be covered for months to come
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, December 30, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, December 30, 2025
Gemini Links 30/12/2025: FreeBSD, Gemlogs, and Xobaque
Links for the day
Get Ready for Gigantic XBox Layoffs at Microsoft (Much Bigger Than in 2025)
he unionisation drive is a sign workers already expect this
Concern Trolls: Stop Criticising Poor Gerstner Because Now He's Dead. Reality Check: Gerstner Has Found a Trick for Dodging Tax on His Hundreds of Millions in Wealth.
Maybe even billions in wealth
Samoa: GNU/Linux and ChromeOS Rose to Around 11%
based on Web access data from Samoa
DnD: Debian and Drugs
There will soon be some interesting new information about Debian
A Conundrum of Privacy/Surveillance: Will You Give Them a Stool Sample to "Feel Humane"?
What if skinnerboxes in South Korea also required that people provide urine and stool samples?
Nope, There's No Twitter "Successor"
There's a lot of horrible abuse going on in social control media
A Calm Year in IRC is a Good Year for IRC
Next year IRC will turn 38 (in August) and in 2028 it'll turn 40, just like the FSF did a couple of months ago
Slopfarms Covering Up for "Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella" After a Terrible Performance and a Terrible Year at Microsoft
How to cause many to resign/retire, hence not be counted as "layoffs"
IBM Was Never Saved, It Has Been a Downhill Journey for Decades Already
Gerstner wasn't a tech person but a fiscal butcher
Some GNU Joiners in Geminispace
Jose E. Marchesi (known for GNU poke and a bunch of other things) adopted Gemini Protocol
Jean-Slop Van Damme and the Art of Bull--- Code
it's saving neither time nor money
IBM Seems to be Doing to HashiCorp What It Did to Red Hat (Many Key People Leaving)
"Today marks my last day at HashiCorp, wrapping up an incredibly rewarding 5-year journey"
State of the Slop, Day 364
How does Phoronix feel about Google promoting slopfarms that 'rewrite' its stories and slap slop images on top?
Links 30/12/2025: "Durian Tsunami" and "Unneeded Surgeries"
Links for the day
Links 30/12/2025: Social Control Media Detox, Rage Against Slop Wasting People's Productive Capacities
Links for the day
Reality Check About IBM's Louis Grestner, Slopfarms Say He Was IBM CEO for 30 Years!
It is "hallucinating" (lying)
Debt as the New Currency?
Rich people get richer because they take money from the rest of us, if not directly then by compelling us (collectively) to borrow money at a national level, then "invest" in them
EPO People Power - Part XIX - "Berenguer Has Known of Campinos' Substance Abuse First Hand For a Long Time"
"You rightfully claimed that Berenguer is Campinos' protegee"
Gemini Links 30/12/2025: Quitting Coffee, Apartment by the Beach, and Strange Retail Ethics
Links for the day
Nintendo and Sony Outsold Microsoft XBox by 15:1!
The mass layoffs indicate Microsoft is aware of this
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, December 29, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, December 29, 2025
Slopfarm: Firing 35,000 Employee is "Saving the Company"
"Big Blue" is getting smaller all the time
Slopfarms About the "Linux CEO" Linus Torvaldos [sic]
nowadays NVIDIA builds and helps build a giant Ponzi scheme
Vista 11 is "10" (Ten Percent)
Some months ago Microsoft openly admitted that it had lost (shed off) hundreds of millions of Windows users
Dealing With Online Pogroms
lawfare funded by third parties
The Year Apple Would Rather Forget
We await further stumbles and falls from Apple (in 2026)
"EU's reform agenda threatens to erase a decade of digital rights"
This is really sad for those of us who spent decades promoting and boosting/advocating the EU
IBM Layoffs in India, More Coming Soon, Say Apparent Insiders
Threads regarding IBM layoffs
Gemini Links 29/12/2025: Earlier "Happy New Year 2026" and "Dead Archivist Society"
Links for the day
Links 29/12/2025: Putin Critic Sergei Udaltsov Imprisoned, Cloudflare’s Outages Discussed
Links for the day
LLMs Are Inherently Parasitic, We Need to Treat Them Accordingly
a maintenance burden for those who possess actual intelligence
Links 29/12/2025: Bottled Water Considered Harmful, Cheetos Promoting Nazis in Europe
Links for the day
EPO People Power - Part XVIII - European Patent Office "Paints Itself as Progressive While Literally Being Represented by Cokeheads"
To what length/s will German authorities and media (not just in Germany) go to protect the EPO's "precious image"?
What IBM Will Do to Red Hat in the Coming Year or Years
This won't end up well for GNU/Linux as a whole
Not Turning in His Grave: When People Die, Their Corporate Destruction Becomes a "Turnaround"
All he did was mass layoffs - a tradition that has not ended since then
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, December 28, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, December 28, 2025
Louis Gerstner Has Died, His Legacy of Mass Layoffs at IBM Hasn't
Hagiographies will follow. They will say he "saved" IBM.
Links 29/12/2025: The Sunday Routine, Limits of Memory, and Gemini Vocabulary
Links for the day