by Marty Gottesfeld
from jail
My name is Marty Gottesfeld and I defended Justina Pelletier
and her parents’ rights when she was medically kidnapped by Harvard’s Boston
Children’s Hospital (BCH) in 2014.
Shortly thereafter the FBI and U.S. Justice Department began
systematically trying to destroy the lives that my lovely and courageous wife
Dana and I had built for ourselves in nearby Somerville, Massachusetts.
They nearly succeeded. This month marks the beginning of my
third year in jail awaiting trial for helping to save Justina’s life.
It also marks the beginning of the end of the 5-year federal
criminal statute of limitations on the crimes perpetrated by the hospital and
its staff, who accepted hundreds of thousands of Medicaid dollars to treat
Justina for a condition that she never had in the first place.
I’ve been called Justina’s “Guardian Hacktivist.” Rolling
Stone calls me “The Hacker Who Cared Too Much.” I’ve also been called a
“political prisoner.”
As many victims of medical kidnapping are acutely aware,
unfortunately political connections matter more than facts in these cases and
the one common thread which weaves its way through nearly every party that
chose to persecute the Pelletiers as well as my family and me is Harvard.
You see, not only is BCH a Harvard institution whose
employees use Harvard email addresses, not only is it a local hotspot for
medical kidnappings, but the former U.S. attorney who chose to indict me, as
well as the acting U.S. attorney who replaced her before Trump was sworn in and
the former governor of Massachusetts who ignored Justina’s plight until she was
crippled and nearly dead are all closely-aligned with the Ivy League
university.
In fact, federal Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler, who
signed off on the search warrant for my home and who ordered me detained
without bail, worked at Harvard Medical School, she is married to a current
Harvard medical school professor and she was the director of a foundation which
still raises money for Justina’s torturers.
She didn’t recuse herself from my case, though this past
summer she recused herself from another matter involving Harvard hospitals.
Throughout this whole ordeal, until recently, there was also
Adam J. Bookbinder, the former top federal cybercrime prosecutor in Boston and
– you guessed it – he’s a Harvard grad. It was Bookbinder who applied for a
wiretap on my cable modem as well as for a search warrant for my home.
He had the FBI hand-deliver me a target letter after they
seized thousands of dollars of my computer equipment. And that was before the
FBI went to see my in-laws in California to try to intimidate them as well. It
was also Bookbinder who hand-picked magistrate Bowler and lied by omission
about her conflicts of interest.
And when we started exposing all of this, it was Bookbinder
who threatened my wife for posting things to YouTube. He’s now been lampooned
by the left and emasculated by the right.
Then, at the last court hearing that I attended, I
confronted Bookbinder while Dana held up before and after photos of Justina,
showing how his alma mater had transformed her from vibrantly figure skating
into barely being able to push her wheelchair.
For the record too, there are other things about Bookbinder
that I look forward to exposing soon, but that will be another story.
Regardless, right after the hearing above a new prosecutor
was assigned to my case. Then Bookbinder withdrew from it.
Fast forward a month or two, and we have just learned that
Bookbinder – a career prosecutor and division chief – quit his job to go into
private practice as a partner at the firm Holland and Knight LLP.
I wonder, do they really know who they just hired? And did
Bookbinder leave his career as a prosecutor because of the facts that are
already out there or was there more?
It’s no secret to the Boston U.S. attorney’s office that
I’ve long been suspicious of Bookbinder and that we’ve been digging into his
background…
https://medicalkidnap.com/2018/02/12/computer-hacker-who-defended-medical-kidnapping-of-justina-pelletier-speaks-out-from-jail-where-he-has-been-for-2-years-without-a-trial/
___________________________________________________________________________
A man facing prison time for the 2014 hacking of a Boston
hospital's computer network says he is running for Senate as a Republican from
behind bars.
Martin Gottesfeld's wife, Dana, said in an email Wednesday
that volunteers are helping collect the 10,000 signatures required for
Gottesfeld to run in the 2018 Massachusetts race to unseat incumbent Elizabeth
Warren. The U.S. Constitution doesn't bar those accused or even convicted of
crimes from serving in Congress.
Martin Gottesfeld said he's running because he feels
"monied interests can just violate constitutional rights and take children
away from their families."
He previously said he orchestrated the hospital computer
attack to protest the treatment of Justina Pelletier, a Connecticut teenager at
the center of a custody dispute based on conflicting medical diagnoses.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/article200108969.html
See: http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2017/11/gottesfeld-update-2.html
http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2017/07/gottesfeld-update.html
http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2017/03/gottesfeld-on-pelletier.html
http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2016/11/justice-for-msrtin-gottesfeld.html
http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2016/09/martin-gottesfelds-defense.html
See: http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2017/11/gottesfeld-update-2.html
http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2017/07/gottesfeld-update.html
http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2017/03/gottesfeld-on-pelletier.html
http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2016/11/justice-for-msrtin-gottesfeld.html
http://childnervoussystem.blogspot.com/2016/09/martin-gottesfelds-defense.html
On February 28, the prosecution in the Martin Gottesfeld case submitted a “motion in limine,” asking Federal Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton to disallow one of Gottesfeld’s primary defenses – that he was reacting in defense of Justina Pelletier, who he believed was being “tortured.”…
ReplyDeleteGottesfeld argues, however, that Pelletier was indeed being “tortured,” citing a statement by Justina Pelletier herself, a letter written by whistleblower-nurse Kathleen Higgins, and a letter written by former federal prosecutor and member of the board for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Barry Pollack, who was representing a client who had also allegedly been mistreated in Bader 5 (the psychiatric facility at BCH).
Justina Pelletier described her time in state custody as “torture” during an interview after her release in June 2014. She recounted disturbing behavior on the part of some staff members, and added that she didn’t want what happened to her to “happen to anyone else.”
While Higgins was not working in Bader 5 at the time of Justina’s detainment there, according to Gottesfeld, she claimed in her January 8, 2014 letter that she was “engaged” with the Pelletier family, and acting as an advocate.
After detailing Justina Pelletier’s story, Higgins stated in part:
Since April 23, 2013, I have been engaged with Linda, Lou, and Jennifer Pelletier, the parents and eldest sister of Justina Pelletier, to facilitate Justina’s discharge from Bader 5, inpatient psychiatric unit of Boston Children’s Hospital, where she has been unjustly and illegally imprisoned for the past nine months...
I am submitting this information, which has been made public, in the form of a complaint against Judge Joseph Johnston, Dr. Colleen Ryan and the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families for the emotional and medical abuse Justina Pelletier has suffered for nearly a year. It would be far more accurate to call the “treatment” forced on Justina by its more proper term, “torture.”
The December 21, 2013 letter from Pollack demanded an investigation into Bader 5, stating in part:
Based on publicized reports by several families, there's been a pattern of abuse of children by one or more health care providers at the Bader 5 inpatient unit of Children's Hospital...
As reported in the growing number of cases in which allegations are becoming public, Bader 5 healthcare providers, including Gary Gosselin and Colleen Ryan, along with an in-house counsel named Ellen Rothstein, appear to favor hasty accusations of medical child abuse or the like against parents who challenge them. Based on allegations by multiple families, Gosselin and/or Ryan have even taken harsh stances to avoid second opinions that parents wish to seek from other facilities...
Furthermore, Children's Hospitals concerted efforts with the DCF has resulted in Bader 5 operating under color of state law, within the meaning of federal civil rights laws, 42 U.S.C. 1983…
Gottesfeld disputes the prosecution’s dismissal of BCH’s “pattern of moving to have the state obtain legal custody of patients in its care,” pointing to a Boston Globe piece in which just such a pattern is described, and even given a name: “parent-ectomy.”
These cases are rare, but not as rare as one might think. In just the last 18 months, Children’s — which given its reputation attracts many of the toughest cases from across the Northeast — has been involved in at least five cases where a disputed medical diagnosis led to parents either losing custody or being threatened with that extreme measure. Similar custody fights have occurred on occasion at other pediatric hospitals around the country.
It happens often enough that the pediatrician who until recently ran the child protection teams at both Children’s and Massachusetts General Hospital said she and others in her field have a name for this aggressive legal-medical maneuver. They call it a “parent-ectomy.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/28371/prosecution-trying-keep-jailed-hacktivist-martin-frank-camp
He believed a teenager was being abused, and having been an abused child himself, he decided to help, using the computer skills he'd been honing since he attended a New England prep school with a guy named Mark Zuckerberg.
ReplyDeleteZuckerberg would graduate from Phillips Exeter Academy, attend Harvard and eventually become the founder of Facebook. Martin Gottesfeld would became a hacker — in his view, an ethical one.
It's a view not shared by federal prosecutors in Massachusetts.
There, Gottesfeld has been jailed for two years, awaiting trial on multiple charges stemming from a 2014 cyberattack on the website of Boston Children's Hospital, a hack he's admitted in public statements to orchestrating.
The federal indictment also contains details of a cyberattack a year earlier on Logan River Academy in northern Utah, Gottesfeld's first foray into "hacktivism," which is the practice of infiltrating a computer network or disabling a network through distributed denial of service attacks to achieve a social or political goal.(continued)
He believed a teenager was being abused, and having been an abused child himself, he decided to help, using the computer skills he'd been honing since he attended a New England prep school with a guy named Mark Zuckerberg.
ReplyDeleteZuckerberg would graduate from Phillips Exeter Academy, attend Harvard and eventually become the founder of Facebook. Martin Gottesfeld would became a hacker — in his view, an ethical one.
It's a view not shared by federal prosecutors in Massachusetts.
There, Gottesfeld has been jailed for two years, awaiting trial on multiple charges stemming from a 2014 cyberattack on the website of Boston Children's Hospital, a hack he's admitted in public statements to orchestrating.
The federal indictment also contains details of a cyberattack a year earlier on Logan River Academy in northern Utah, Gottesfeld's first foray into "hacktivism," which is the practice of infiltrating a computer network or disabling a network through distributed denial of service attacks to achieve a social or political goal.
The Gottesfeld case is a made-for-the-big-screen saga involving telegenic newlyweds, a rescue at sea by a Disney cruise ship and a U.S. Senate campaign launched from Gottesfeld's cell in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
It's also a test of the boundaries of what is known as ethical or "white-hat" hacking — the invasion of a computer network for the purposes of doing good.
Federal law does not distinguish between "good" and "bad" hacking; anyone who "intentionally accesses a computer without authorization" can be prosecuted, and many states have similarly strict laws...
Gottesfeld has lived in Massachusetts for most of his life, but strangely enough, he arrived in jail by way of Utah.
He was working as a senior systems engineer when he began dating the Brandeis University student who would become his wife. Dana Barach had a younger brother who had recently been admitted to Logan River Academy, a residential treatment facility for teens.
(continued)
(continued)Dana visited her brother in 2013 and was upset by what she saw and learned about teens being kept in seclusion, which she and her husband thought amounted to abuse.
ReplyDeleteGottesfeld had been physically abused by his grandfather, a fact confirmed by a Rolling Stone magazine reporter last year. A sensitive young man who has said he cried when Swartz committed suicide, Gottesfeld wanted to shut the academy down. With the help of other people associated with Anonymous, a loosely organized coalition of hactivists, he launched an online attack on the facility's website that lasted for more than a week and attracted national attention.
A spokesperson for the Utah Department of Human Services said its Office of Licensing investigated the allegations in 2013 but found no violations, and the controversy quickly blew over.
But when Gottesfeld learned about a Connecticut family that accused Boston Children's Hospital of "medical kidnapping" he decided to employ the same strategy to help Justina Pelletier.
Pelletier, then 14, suffered from mitrochrondrial disease, and the state of Massachusetts took permanent custody of her after her parents took her to Boston Children's for complications from the flu. She spent more than a year in a psychiatric ward before she was released to her parents after public outcry, which included Gottesfeld's cyberattack on the hospital during its annual fundraising drive.
Gottesfeld's role in Pelletier's return home, however, was widely condemned, even by others in the hacking community. During the attack, one person associated with Anonymous posted online "IT IS A HOSPITAL. STOP IT."
In court filings, Boston Children's Hospital has said that it lost more than $600,000 because of Gottesfeld's actions and that the attack disrupted research and basic operations. Gottesfeld has countered that no one was injured by his actions, and that one person — Pelletier — was demonstrably helped.
Gottesfeld and his wife have publicly campaigned for the dismissal of charges with a campaign called Free Marty G, and last week, his attorney filed a motion asking the court to dismiss the charges, saying that his lengthy detainment has violated guarantees of the Speedy Trial Act.
But many people who work in computer security, including Justin Searle of Salt Lake City, insist that hackers can't operate outside the law, regardless of how well meaning they are.
Searle, director of ICS security for InGuardians, a security consulting firm, teaches ethical hacking all over the world, although he dislikes the word "hacker," which he believes has been turned into a negative term by the media.
Searle believes that Gottesfeld and other rogue hackers should go to jail, regardless of their motivation. He likens their actions to a protestor who sets police cars on fire or throws barricades through windows.
"I don't see them as ethical hackers; I see them as criminals that deserve to be arrested and incarcerated," Searle said.
Gottesfeld, however, argues that the penalties for that sort of civil disobedience are not as draconian as some of the penalties that hackers face under current federal law.
“We as a society have to choose what types of behavior we want to incentivize and deincentivize,” he said, answering questions from The Deseret News that were conveyed through his wife. “The behaviors we want to deincentivize should not be selfless behaviors that are meant to further the greater good, protect children from abuse, protect whistleblowers, etc."
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900017499/heres-what-we-can-learn-from-the-good-guy-hackers.html