"We have an opportunity here to make the courts, as these cases wind their way up, understand privacy issues, emerging tech issues, against the backdrop of civil rights and through the prism of free information... DDoS is absolutely speech, it should absolutely be recognized as such, protected as such, and the law should be changed... The government and people who write about tech tend to call it a "DDoS attack" but in certain circumstances it's not a DDoS attack, but a DDoS protest. So the law should be narrowly drawn and what needs to be excised from that are the legitimate protests. It's really easy to tell legitimate protests, I think, and we should be broadly defining legitimate protests... I don't have to like or agree with the people that I represent to represent them. I have represented neo-Nazis and I'm Jewish… Everyone is entitled to a defense and the more reprehensible they are and maybe the more guilty they seem at the beginning of the case makes them more entitled to a vigorous and hard-hitting defense. So I don't necessarily know that there's someone I wouldn't represent based upon what they did or based upon their politics... People who cooperate, throw someone else into harm's way so they can soften the blow on themselves, I tend not to represent."

“The thing about free speech and free expression is people that are interested in it are by their very nature always tending to explore the boundaries...In a society that prizes free expression and one that has a great premium upon the marketplace of ideas, it's hard to say that someone went too far in expressing themselves when really no harm was done.”

“The warrant did not give the power to rummage through the journalist’s files ... there is no indication of why all this information needed to be seized”

““The days of ‘Let’s haul this kid in front of the judge, scare him and send him home with a warning’ are long since gone . . . Prosecutorial discretion is a great thing if it’s exercised, but it doesn’t happen in any meaningful way these days, because prosecutions are so politicized.”

“There’s no such thing as a DDoS ‘attack’ ... A DDoS is a protest, it’s a digital sit it. It is no different than physically occupying a space. It’s not a crime, it’s speech.”

“Leiderman thought it was not enough that the government dropped charges. He wanted the criminal justice system to recognize Gonzalez’s innocence affirmatively. There is such a thing as a declaration of factual innocence, he explained to Gonzalez. A judge can grant it. It is exceedingly rare – so rare that many cops and lawyers go a career without seeing one. It means not just that prosecutors couldn’t make a case against you, but that you didn’t do the crime. The case remained on the docket of Ventura County Superior Court Judge Patricia Murphy, who had earlier ordered Gonzalez held without bail. Leiderman petitioned the judge, trying not to get his client’s hopes up. He laid out the case, pointing out the holes in West’s story and the numerous alibi witnesses. Prosecutors did not want Gonzalez declared innocent. They knew a jury wouldn’t convict him but said they couldn’t be positive of his innocence. Ventura County’s chief assistant district attorney, later explained their reasoning: The attack West described was “improbable, but it wasn’t physically impossible.” In January 2009, nearly a year after Gonzalez’s arrest, Leiderman called him excitedly: The judge had sided with them. Gonzalez was soon holding a certified copy of the judge’s order declaring him factually innocent.”

“Hack has become a sort of all-encompassing term, when in fact some of this was social engineering, some of this was good old-fashioned regular ‘there’s a hole, I’m going to walk through it’,” said Leiderman. “If you left your front door open people wouldn’t really call it a break-in. To some extent Stratfor were unsecure to the point where it was like their front door was open and Mr Hammond allegedly, with some others, walked right in, and people are calling it a hack. “As far as I’m aware, nothing was really hacked in the classic sense,” he added.”