Side Channels

The couple who wrote the Trojan horse that was the tool of choice by numerous top Israeli companies to spy on each other confessed to all charges as part of a plea bargain. Ruth, the wife and distributor, took most of the blame basically saying “what? Was this wrong? That’s news to me!” and Michael, the author of the software said “What? I was just playing around! Did my wife sell this crap? That’s news to me!” Before being extradited to Israel from the UK, they agreed to their prospective sentence; basically, this trial is a charade, a joke. Everything was preordained.
The prosecution asks for 4 years in prison for Ruth and 2 for Michael; both will pay $1M damages.

Update/revision:
My prediction promised by Richard… I had to re-visit it, in light of the potential attention… so here is rev.2:
The issue here is that these crimes are not considered serious enough by the local population to constitute a long term prison sentence… 4 years is a long time. While it was obvious from the beginning that most of the work was done by Michael and he should carry the load, they (as in Michael and Ruth) chose to make Ruth take most of the heat. This was, I believe, a strategy to get reduced sentences for both (the couple share a two year old daughter.) So in practice, they might get a couple of years in prison but I don’t think they will sit in prison, each, for more than a year. We’ll see if the Judge accepts the plea on March 27th.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 at 5:59 pm and is filed under security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.