http://thesmokinggun.com/documents/eekdacat-and-the-fbi-576432
By William Bastone and Andrew Goldberg
The Smoking Gun
May 13, 2014
In an effort to identify leaders of Anonymous, the FBI arrested an
autistic New York man and then used him as a cooperating witness to help
snare a notorious fellow hacker who was subsequently indicted for his
central role in a series of high-profile online attacks, The Smoking Gun
has learned.
In return for the hacker’s cooperation--and in light of his
autism--Department of Justice officials initially agreed to defer
prosecution on a criminal complaint charging the man with hacking Gawker
Media, an illegal incursion that yielded registration information for more
than a million individuals who signed up with the popular blog network.
Federal prosecutors eventually dropped the hacking charge altogether,
according to court records that were kept under seal long after the
hacker’s arrest by a team of FBI agents. Investigators were concerned that
if the man’s cooperation became public, he would be harassed by hackers
then being targeted by the FBI. Additionally, disclosure of his
cooperation, prosecutors contended, “would jeopardize substantial ongoing
investigations into the defendant’s former co-conspirators, many of whom
are suspected of carrying out substantial computer hacks against several
businesses.”
So, to “help ensure the defendant’s safety,” Thomas “Eekdacat” Madden
became, for a time, “John Doe.”
The 26-year-old Madden, whose cooperation has not been previously
disclosed, lives with his parents in Troy, a city 10 minutes outside
Albany. An only child, Madden graduated in December 2010 from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, where he completed a double major in computer
science and mathematics, according to school records.
[...]
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