Fannie Mae 'hacker' says he didn't do it

In order to get a trial in the USA you must plead innocent. If you plead guilty you cannot get a trial as the issue has been decided in your plea. You can however, plead innocent, and then when the trial begins change to a guilty plea which will end the trial and move into sentencing.

Often the first responder muddies up the evidence. If you worked where this guy works, you might see the use of common logons tracked by paper logs. You might see a failure to maintain and archive security logs in a sound manner. The fact that the unauthorized modification had to be discovered by someone indicates that they do not have a decent system to maintain system integrity, such as TripWire. If they do have the system, they clearly do not regularly look at their alerts. As is too common in alleged computer crime, the management did not take the initiative to protect their information assets and this management failure allows unauthorized activities to occur without consequence.

The time to deal with serious security incidents is before the occur. You would have the incident response team execute the plan spelled out in your system accreditation. The response will have been tested and would have the admissibility you may lack. Management’s lack of a incident response plan and incident response team would just mean the cat is away (for you non English speakers, the colloquialism is “When the cat is away, the mouse will play”). Well, this mouse just might get more than a day in court.

I'd say the FEDS ARE PARANOID. IT GOES AROUND YOU KNOW. They are "sending a message" with this guy.

"Fannie Mae was the once largest US mortgage finance company and lost loads of money and evicted loads of poor souls after lending billions to people never likely to be able to pay the money back."

When did Fannie start loaning money? Fannie buys up mortgages that the bank lends. Please ensure that you report factually information!!! Also, they probably bought those bad mortgages because they were force by regulators and government to provide housing to low income people, possibly people that could not afford and should not be buying a home. If you want to blame someone, why don’t you blame the banks then. They originated the loan, not fannie.

Evidence should show when the program was updated showing the first time the malicious code was inserted. This should correlate to guilt or innocence of the accuse.

This case will probably be so technical that jurors or judges will not be able to determine what is fact. I think its going to come down to the lawyer's arguments and which expert witness is believed. Part of the issue is that it could be argued that the defendant was also a victim of some super hacker and was chosen as the super hacker's proxy because of the defendant's terminated status and high privileges.

Look what happened! You turned over a rock and layywers cam wigglwing out! Sqush-em Sqush-em!

Let's make sure this guy isn't autistic first. Maybe he was just looking for UFOs in those servers.

Not true. You can always go to trial and plead Guilty. Happens somewhat regularly. It allows you to introduce mitigating circumstances in the penalty phase.

Suppose you were guilty of a crime in America, and you believed the prosecutor was unwilling to view any mitigating circumstances, and would only offer a deal of the maximum for the most severe form of the crime. It happens a lot.

Then suppose you felt a jury of your peers might see things in a better light, and you wanted to go to trial and present your side of the matter.

In America you can only get a trial by jury by pleading "innocent". No one seriously believes you are declaring you did not do it, it's just how you get a trial rather than judgement by a judge and prosecutor.