24 June – LAWFUEL – The Law News Network – The United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California announced that Robert Lyttle was sentenced today to four months in prison for hacking into various government computers in April 2002.
According to the plea agreement, Mr. Lyttle, who was known as half of “The Deceptive Duo,” unlawfully accessed computer systems of various federal agencies in April 2002, including the Department of Defense’s Defense Logistic Information Service (DLIS) and Office of Health Affairs (OHA) and the National Aeronautic and Space Administration’s (NASA) Ames Research Center (ARC). Specifically, Mr. Lyttle pleaded guilty to gaining unauthorized access to (and thereby damaging) DLIS computers in Battle Creek, Michigan for the purpose of obtaining files that he later used to deface an OHA website hosted on computers in San Antonio, Texas. Mr. Lyttle also pleaded guilty to gaining unauthorized access to a NASA ARC computer located at Moffett Field, California and obtaining information from that computer for the purpose of defacing a website hosted on the computer. As a result of these and other actions, Mr. Lyttle admitted to causing damages in excess of $70,000.
Mr. Lyttle, 21, of Pleasant Hill, California, was indicted by a federal grand jury on July 15, 2004. He was charged with various counts of unauthorized access to government computers.
The sentence was handed down by U.S. District Court Judge D. Lowell Jensen following a guilty plea on five counts in violation of various subsections of 18 U.S.C. § 1030. Judge Jensen sentenced the defendant to four months in federal prison, and restitution in the amount of $71,181, as well as a 3 year period of supervised release. Judge Jensen also ordered that the first 4 months of the supervised release term be served in home confinement with electronic monitoring. The defendant will begin serving the sentence on August 24, 2005.
The prosecution was the result of an investigation by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the Office of Inspector General of NASA. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyle F. Waldinger prosecuted the case.
A copy of this press release and related court filings may be found on the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s website at www.usdoj.gov/usao/can . Related court documents and information may be found on the U.S. District Court website at www.cand.uscourts.gov or on .
