First way is that victim #2 has routine non-career interactions with the others. The article itself mentions that one of the alleged victims was Dorothy Bush, who was likely interesting to Guccifier not because of where she works / worked, but because she is an immediate relative of someone interesting. Assuming victim #2 is not Dorothy Bush directly, the same explanation could apply. Expand the non-career web out to touch parents, siblings, and adult offspring of interesting well known personalities and you have a decent sized list. Expand it again to touch the spouses, siblings, etc. of those people and the list is huge. Techdirt’s critique of NSA’s “three hops” theory shows how things grow fast, especially if we include friends instead of only blood/legal relatives.

Second way is that victim #2 has an account name that is “close enough” to the account name of someone interesting that Guccifier targeted it either hoping it was an alias or by mistake. Even if victim #2 is a “little guy” who ordinarily could not interest the Feds in investigating his/her case, once they realized that Guccifier had hit him and that they already had Guccifier, they would throw it on the list to extend the charge sheet.

It’s obvious why Victim 2 is named in the indictment; ust read the thing. Guccifer (seriously? Guccifer?)got information from the important accounts he had hacked, then used the account of Victim 2 to send that information to the press. Victim 2 is a key part of the narrative, so of course the lawyers include him.

By the way it’s “Guccifer” not “Guccifier.” Though there’s still time for him to become a household name, it’s unlikely he’ll ever be worth of a back-formation.

I don’t have much sympathy for this guy. He seemed to think he was doing some kind of public service doxing various famed people among the illuminati(???). In reality, he is just an annoying miscreant publicizing any personal information he got his hands on via guessing answers to account security questions. By now, any serious hacker knows you cannot rely on the use of a single proxy to maintain your anonymity. Yet, he made that mistake and he sometimes used screen captures when the same data was available via files. This reveals his lack of true hacker skills. No l33t H4x0r is he! The main reason I don’t have much sympathy for him though, is he is a cab driver and I have had some very bad experiences with cab drivers in Eastern Europe.

Despite all that, The US DOJ is still overreaching in its prosecution here. There are 9 counts.

For counts 1-3, wire fraud, they include “…to obtain money and property…”. From what is revealed in the indictment and various media reports, he was not selling the information he illicitly acquired or using it for extortion. Yet, they will argue, as with Weev, that he profited from his hacking, so a charge of fraud applies. That charge is not justified.

Count 7, Aggravated Identity Theft: Guccifer’s actions consisted of sending an email from victim 4 to victim 3, intending to provoke victim 3. I can see how that fits into identity theft but I wonder how believable, to victim 3, that email was. I doubt the prosecution would want take that into account. My hunch is that, being provocative, it was not so believable and then count 7 would not be justified.

Count 8, Cyberstalking: Without further information it is hard to evaluate this charge. This is what mystifies me though. How can a hacker thousands of miles away be both capable of surveillance and able to harass a victim at the same time? It were talking about control of an email account and possibly other social media accounts, it would seem, that once the victim became aware of the hacking they could changes passwords and answers to security questions and block the surveillance.

Count 9, Obstruction of Justice: This seems too easy to add as a serious crime when it can include any attempt by the culprit to stay hidden or erase his tracks. Recent examples are:
1: An obstruction of justice charge against Barret Brown’s mother for putting a laptop in a kitchen cabinet.

2: A recent charge against Khairullozhon Matanov, a friend of the Boston bombers. He erased some of the browser history on his computer not to cover any crime he did (The FBI does not think he was involved) but his connection with the bombers, his interest in jihad, and his interest in news coverage of the story. So, the indictment mentions his erasure of his browser history for CNN coverage of the bombing story as an example of obstruction of justice.

A final issue, is when someone is convicted in a foreign country is there any overlap when the US charges them with similar crimes. Is it fair to convict them of the same crime in two different countries? The indictment even asks for forfeiture when you can be sure Romania has already seized his computer and he did not gain any property from his exploits.