Troll, Inc. Movie Review

“Troll, Inc.” is a case study of how the online experts in cracking and hacking systems are treated like modern-day terrorists. There are groups of elite hackers who know all of the insecure weak points on the Internet, and then they know how to kick open the door and cause havoc. One such person is Andrew Auernheimer, who goes by the online handle ‘weev’. What he did in 2010 is what can be called either a wake-up call to a large company, or a large-scale attempt at computer sabotage and extortion.

There are some computer experts who can find web site exploits and they inform the company in charge. These are sometimes called ‘white-hat hackers’. But there are other people who can locate some of the same security flaws, and they steal lots of valuable information. These are known as “black-hat crackers”. These people are in for a profit, or just to mess up a company real bad. But sometime there is a person in the middle, a guy like Andrew Auernheimer. He can find out about a flaw and he can set up a way to ‘obtain’ over one-hundred thousand valid e-mail addresses.

In this case, it was 2010 and Apple had just released the iPad. Apple had partnered with AT&T to be the data provider for the iPad product. To make it super easy to sue, the security was minimal. That was a selling feature. It also opened up a door to allow Auernheimer to capture all the e-mail addresses that people used to sign up for the data service. There were many celebrities, military and academics in this huge list of addresses. He contacted Apple and AT&T, but neither was interested. So ‘weev’ did the next logical thing (for him). He dumped all of the data  out on the open Internet, mostly to shame the companies.

But the Justice Department and the FBI were not amused. They found out that Andrew Auernheimer was pretty much the guy behind that massive ‘data breach’. But AT&T even agreed in internal e-mails that the security was so poor that it was not really a criminal event. Regardless, Auernheimer was treated like a data terrorist, and he was  pursued for years and then arrested,  before the eventual trail and conviction. He has a bit of an anarchist streak, and he basically told the court where to go and what they could do there. So the ruling came down pretty hard on him.

There was a successful appeal, and Andrew Auernheimer eventually had the conviction overruled. It was a technicality on where the trail was held, no on if he was innocent. So the thing that he did was not excused, but he was free once again. He decided to get better results elsewhere so now he lives overseas. Plus he is in a country that will never be extradited back to a USA prison anytime soon.

“Troll, Inc” is a short but to-the-point documentary about this event and this man. There are plenty of ‘talking head’ interviews with professors and other “white-hat hackers”, plus a handful of people who helped with the ‘involuntary email address extraction’ process. There are plenty of talks with Auernheimer, also. He gives his side of the story. He explains that he has no love for companies that have no idea about how important security is for keeping the public’s data safe and locked up.

So, when he could, he would make the company feel they were the butt of a huge practical joke. But that joke was not funny and the tables got turned on him.