Weev, Part 1

November 27, 2024·30 min·2 clips

Weev asked his own lawyer to request the maximum prison sentence — for the publicity.

By 2011, Thor Eklund was close to the floor. He had gone from Broadway production manager to junior associate in commercial and securities litigation, then quit for criminal defense without clients, money, or much idea what came next. It did not fix him. The episode paints him as restless, drinking too much, and watching his marriage collapse, which made him an odd match for a defendant built almost entirely out of defiance. That defendant was Weev. The case began with Spittler exposing email addresses tied to iPad owners, then moved through GOATC Security's appetite for spectacle. Weev knew exactly what attention could do. He emailed journalists at their own exposed addresses with the subject line, "Hi, I stole your email from AT&T. Want to know how?" Gawker ran with it. Its June 2010 story about Apple's worst security breach and 114,000 exposed iPad owners embarrassed AT&T and Apple in one shot. Then the mood changed. Weeks later, FBI agents raided Weev's home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, arrested him, and put him in the path of a prosecution seeking the maximum prison term under the law. Bail was just the beginning. Weev had no job, no steady income, and no way to pay the six-figure lawyer he thought understood the case. His federal defender pushed for a deal. Daniel Spittler took one and got 12 months in prison. Weev refused, even with prosecutors seeking five years. Then chance took over. Weev later wrote that after meeting upwards of a hundred attorneys and almost preparing to represent himself, he met Eklund while trolling passersby with an inflammatory sign at Zuccotti Park. Bleak, strange, and somehow fitting: a collapsing lawyer, a defiant defendant, and a case where exposed data and public shame started to look like federal leverage.

As heard by us

A sharp setup for Weev's AT&T case, where exposed iPad emails, hacker theater, and federal prosecution collide.

Weev, Part 1 works best as the origin story of a federal cybercrime fight, not a clean technical teardown. The episode follows the AT&T iPad email exposure from Daniel Spittler's technical work to Weev's talent for spectacle: an attention-grabbing note to journalists, a damaging…

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Why you'd press play

Meet the hacker who broke the news to journalists about the breach by emailing them using their own stolen AT&T addresses.

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