Marty Gottesfeld
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Marty Gottesfeld is an American hacktivist and computer security engineer convicted for a 2014 denial-of-service attack on Boston Children's Hospital, carried out in protest of the hospital's treatment of teenage patient Justina Pelletier (referred to in the source recording as "Christine Pelletier") during a high-profile custody and medical dispute. The attack cost the hospital tens of thousands of dollars and disrupted its operations for days, though no patients were directly harmed by the disruption.

Background

Gottesfeld says his father worked as an Apollo-program rocket scientist and computer programmer who taught him to code at age three. Gottesfeld wrote his first program at five, sold his first at twelve, and was working as a full-time network infrastructure and data security engineer by eighteen. Before his prosecution he worked as a data security coordinator at a Massachusetts biotech company, handling business continuity and disaster recovery planning for health organizations and Fortune 500 companies.

Prosecution

A jury declined to convict Gottesfeld on the charge that his actions endangered patient care, convicting him only on financial-damage grounds. He says prosecutors David Deitch and Seth Kosto failed to prove to the jury the ethical core of their case, that his actions had endangered patient lives, a claim he says the government nonetheless used as a rhetorical "cudgel" regardless of the verdict.

Federal prison and the Reynolds case

Gottesfeld served time as a federal prisoner alongside John Kiriakou at FCI Loretto, where he became an advocate for fellow inmate Donnie Reynolds Jr.. Gottesfeld theorizes Reynolds was targeted as a Justice Department scapegoat in the aftermath of the ATF's Operation Fast and Furious scandal after refusing to serve as an undercover cartel weapons source, and that Reynolds's life-plus-75-year sentence, longer than that given to cartel boss El Chapo, reflects his potential to implicate powerful figures if his case became public.

Solitary confinement and the CMU

John Kiriakou has separately described Gottesfeld's imprisonment as a case study in the use of Communications Management Units against whistleblowers: Gottesfeld was held more than nine months in solitary confinement inside a CMU, cut off from mail, phone calls, and visits except through the court, after bringing to light evidence that a teenage girl, Justina Pelletier, was being abused at Boston Children's Hospital and being charged with computer crimes carrying a 10-year sentence. Kiriakou says Gottesfeld lost all of his accrued good-behavior time in prison over conduct as minor as writing a letter to a journalist, and asking his attorney by phone to tell his wife he was okay, treated by prison authorities as forbidden "third-party communication."

See also

- Donnie Reynolds Jr.
- FCI Loretto
- John Kiriakou
