Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer was convicted in the widely-publicized theft of email addresses of AT&T-connected iPads, but the verdict was overturned Watch video
PRINCETON -- The anti-Semitic fliers found on printers at Princeton University and dozens of other colleges last week were the work of a hacker once prosecuted in New Jersey on charges he stole 120,000 email addresses from AT&T-connected iPads.
Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, a self-described "white nationalist hacktivist" now living in the partially-recognized country of Abkhazia, said in a Twitter chat with NJ Advance Media on Monday said that he was responsible for targeting the printers.
The fliers, which featured a Swastika and touted the white supremacist group The Daily Stormer, were found on multiple printers at Princeton on Thursday and Friday, college officials said. Colleges across the country reported similar fliers.
Auernheimer documented his efforts last week on the social media aggregation platform Storify with a post called "A brief experiment in printing," and on his Twitter page.
He also tweeted news accounts of the fliers after people started finding them on printers around the country and alerting authorities.
Multiple TV news channels picking it up. Always so lol what bash one-liners will cause. https://t.co/wLjtd56NiA
-- Andrew Auernheimer (@rabite) March 25, 2016
Auernheimer said he was not assisted by anyone at Princeton, though he says "we have people on Princeton campus."
Princeton spokeswoman Min Pullan said the university has been alerted Auernheimer has taken credit for the printed fliers, as well as the allegations of white supremacists on campus.
She said Auernheimer may have contacts across the country, but the university is now aware of any such groups on campus.
Auernheimer was convicted in federal court in New Jersey in 2012 on the AT&T email theft allegations. He was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison in 2013, but the conviction was overturned on appeal the following year.
He was freed from prison because the appeals courting determined federal prosecutors tried him in the wrong state.
In 2010, while a resident of Arkansas, Aurenheimer and a codefendant gained access to AT&T's servers and stole the email addresses of more than 120,000 iPad users - including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and film mogul Harvey Weinstein.
They exploited a flaw in AT&T's security to collect the email addresses, officials have said.
Aurenheimer and his codefendant provided the email addresses to online news site Gawker, which published them in redacted form along with a news article about the breach.
The appeals court noted that neither Auernheimer nor his alleged co-conspirator were in New Jersey when they accessed the servers; the servers themselves were not in New Jersey; and the Gawker reporter was not in New Jersey either.
Prosecutors argued New Jersey was the proper venue because about 4,500 of the stolen email addresses belonged to residents of that state.
Aurenheimer moved out of the country to avoid federal prosecution, one news site said. He said Monday he lives in Sukhumi, a town on the Black Sea in Abkhazia, which considers itself an independent nation, but many countries recognize as a part of Georgia.
In 2014, Aurenheimer wrote a post for the website dailystormer.com called "What I Learned from My Time in Prison" and the site published a photo of him with a swastika tattoo.
On his Storify post about the fliers, he wrote that the idea to target printers came from a chat on the dailystormer.com website.
"How many printers are there on the open Internet? I wasn't sure of the answer at the time. It turned out to be upwards of a million devices. That's a lot of things to print to. The sheer volume of paper one can generate with a single command is impressive," the post said.
He then asked someone from the website to make the flier.
"The motivation of everything I do is to stop the genocide of the white race and the invasion of white homelands," Aurenheimer wrote in a direct message on Twitter on Monday.
Pullan said Monday that the university's investigators are working with the FBI on the case, but she had nothing new to report.
Pullan reiterated that the university's networks were not accessed, only printers that have an IP - internet protocol- address accessible through the Internet.
In a statement, Princeton condemned the anti-Semitic message in the fliers.
"Princeton regards any actions making the atmosphere intimidating, threatening or hostile to individuals as serious offenses," said Michele Minter, vice provost for institutional equity and inclusion. "These flyers are offensive and contrary to the values of the University, which is committed to creating and maintaining an environment free from discrimination and harassment."
Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@kevintshea. Find The Times of Trenton on Facebook.