United States v. Hoover (2032)

“The lights stayed on. People ask me that.”

The following is an AI-generated transcript of a resentencing hearing held on November 16, 2032, for security researcher Mahindra Hoover. This piece is inspired by Adam Unikowsky’s near-future legal fiction Not Anymore, and is part of my Legends series. See the Author’s Note at the end for construction notes.

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UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
EASTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA
Alexandria Division

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. MAHINDRA HOOVER
No. 1:28-cr-00184

TRANSCRIPT OF RESENTENCING
November 16, 2032

Before the Honorable Ellen Voss, United States District Judge

APPEARANCES:
For the United States: DANIEL REED, Assistant United States Attorney
For the Defendant: RUTH SHAW, Federal Public Defender

Source: electronic sound recording. Transcription: automated, reviewed.

Proceedings commenced at 9:06 a.m.

THE COURT: Mr. Hoover, have you read the revised presentence report?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes. It still says I destroyed the computers.

MS. SHAW: Paragraph forty-one. That’s our first objection.

THE COURT: We’ll get there. You may sit.

The conviction stands. The court of appeals affirmed it and vacated the sentence because I used replacement costs for equipment that may not have needed replacement. Mr. Hoover was released pending resentencing. That hearing was deferred while the Supreme Court reviewed the necessity question. The Supreme Court affirmed last year. We are here to determine the loss, restitution, and a new sentence.

The September hospital outages are not charged in this case. I have allowed evidence about them because the defense offers it in mitigation. That does not permit me to decide the hospital claims.

Is Mrs. Bell here?

MS. SHAW: Second row.

THE COURT: Mrs. Bell, you may speak today, but I cannot order compensation for your husband’s death in this proceeding. I wanted you to hear that before you waited all morning.

MRS. BELL: I took the day.

THE COURT: All right. Counsel.

MR. REED: The United States seeks thirty-six months in total. The defendant has served eleven.

In 2028 he deliberately flooded approximately four hundred thousand internet addresses with traffic for seventeen minutes. Businesses lost access to their systems. Medical appointments were canceled. He was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of intentionally causing damage without authorization. Disabling access is damage even where the equipment can later be used again.

We accept the revised equipment figures. We do not accept the defense’s account of this conduct as his only choice.

MS. SHAW: The choice has to be described in the time he had to make it. A worm was entering vulnerable computers and using each one to attack others. It selected targets and revised its attacks without waiting for a person. The experts agreed it could reach essentially the whole exposed population in ninety seconds.

His flood was intended to slow it down. We asked for a necessity instruction: let the jury decide whether preventing a greater harm excused the damage he deliberately caused. The jury was not allowed to consider that defense.

MR. REED: Because he did not try the lawful reporting channel before attacking other people’s systems.

MS. SHAW: A channel that took forty-two minutes.

MR. REED: The availability of that defense has been decided.

MS. SHAW: His sentence hasn’t. You are asking for another twenty-five months because he didn’t use a service your own witness said couldn’t act in time.

THE COURT: Mr. Reed, you may rely on the conviction. It does not relieve either of you of addressing the facts relevant to sentence. Ms. Shaw, call your witness.

LEAH ORTIZ, having been duly sworn, testified as follows:

MS. SHAW: Your employment?

MS. ORTIZ: Network engineer with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. I supervised deployment of the containment gateway.

MS. SHAW: What would have happened to Mr. Hoover’s sample in 2028 if he had submitted it?

MS. ORTIZ: It didn’t match a known attack. It would have gone to an analyst. Forty-two minutes was the median wait for that queue.

MS. SHAW: Could an analyst have reached it in ninety seconds?

MS. ORTIZ: There wasn’t a guaranteed minimum wait. Someone could have opened it immediately.

MS. SHAW: Did anyone?

MR. REED: He never sent it.

MS. SHAW: Other people did. Exhibit Four.

MS. ORTIZ: Two reports of the same worm. The first was opened thirty-one minutes after receipt.

MS. SHAW: And Mr. Hoover’s response. Did it work?

MS. ORTIZ: On the networks for which we recovered both sets of logs, the rate of new infections dropped sharply when his flood arrived. During that interval some operators installed filters. Their records are in the exhibit. We can’t extrapolate that to all four hundred thousand addresses. His traffic also prevented people from getting patches. We don’t have a net figure.

MS. SHAW: What would you have preferred him to do?

MS. ORTIZ: Send us the sample. Contact the affected providers. But I can’t tell you either would have worked in ninety seconds. We didn’t have the present system.

MS. SHAW: How does the present system work?

MS. ORTIZ: It checks a report against other sensors and runs automated validation. Above a confidence threshold, it tells participating providers to discard traffic to and from the affected address ranges. An analyst reviews the action afterward.

THE COURT: The computers themselves keep running?

MS. ORTIZ: Usually. People outside can’t reach them. Buildings connected through the provider may not be able to reach each other. That’s different from Mr. Hoover’s flood. He filled links with traffic. We can instruct the network to drop it.

MS. SHAW: Under what statute does the agency instruct a carrier to drop a hospital’s traffic?

MR. REED: Objection. That question is pending in the civil proceedings.

THE COURT: Then it’s pending there. Move on.

MS. SHAW: Exhibit Four is your agency’s —

THE CLERK: Five, Your Honor.

MS. SHAW: Exhibit Five is your agency’s published implementation notice. There were two proposed modes?

MS. ORTIZ: Automatic containment, or automatic containment with a review hold for uncertain cases. My team recommended the hold. September would have gone for review under that proposal.

MS. SHAW: What happened to that recommendation?

MS. ORTIZ: It went back for revision after legal review.

MS. SHAW: Read the paragraph beginning “Availability.”

MS. ORTIZ: “Availability of the government channel must be assessed within the propagation interval. A mandatory human-review step would prevent the Department from certifying compliance with the conditions described in Hoover.”

MS. SHAW: Compliance with what?

MS. ORTIZ: We called it the Hoover requirement. If the validation passed, the system had to act in time. It couldn’t depend on whether an analyst was free.

THE COURT: The opinion did not direct your agency to build this system.

MS. ORTIZ: That was also in the advice. We could retain the old service. We couldn’t retain it and describe it as an effective alternative for attacks like this one.

MS. SHAW: The Court had just affirmed his conviction for not using it.

MR. REED: The majority held that he failed to establish his defense on that record. The discussion of future systems was not an order.

THE COURT: Continue.

MS. SHAW: Ms. Ortiz, who selected the final threshold?

MR. REED: Your Honor, the witness is authorized to testify to the operation of the system. Questions directed at responsibility for the September event belong to the pending claims.

THE COURT: She may answer as to what she did. Not as to whose fault anything was.

MS. ORTIZ: I recommended it. The director approved it. If we were going to remove the hold, that was the threshold I could support from the testing.

MS. SHAW: Did the score establish that the hospital computers would be compromised?

MS. ORTIZ: No. We put that limitation in the notice. Next page.

MS. SHAW: Paragraph six.

MS. ORTIZ: “The score supports intervention under uncertainty. It does not establish that each endpoint in the affected range is vulnerable or would be compromised.”

MS. SHAW: When did the notice go to the oversight committee?

MS. ORTIZ: March. They held the hearing last month.

MS. SHAW: Was there a warrant for September’s containment?

MS. ORTIZ: No. The program operates on an emergency basis. Counsel relied on the opinion’s discussion of emergency entry and destruction of threatened property.

MS. SHAW: When did you approve the settings?

MS. ORTIZ: February.

MS. SHAW: Was there an emergency in February?

MS. ORTIZ: There wasn’t a particular network we could have named for a warrant. We were setting up the service. We had months of review.

MS. SHAW: Exhibit Six. Mr. Hoover’s September report. Please read his description.

MS. ORTIZ: “Possible TALLOW traffic. Exploit pattern matches. Payload not recovered. Could be repair activity. Please check.”

MS. SHAW: What happened next?

MS. ORTIZ: Validation took 184 milliseconds. The instructions went out. Providers began discarding traffic eleven milliseconds later.

MS. SHAW: Including traffic for three hospitals.

MS. ORTIZ: Yes. His description was processed by the system. A person hadn’t read it yet.

MS. SHAW: Did the providers exceed your instructions?

MS. ORTIZ: No. We checked. There was no routing error.

MS. SHAW: How long until service returned?

MS. ORTIZ: Four hours and sixteen minutes at the last hospital. We needed someone inside each network to establish a clean route and confirm containment. Some of our contacts used phones that depended on the connection we’d cut. Two sites had backup carriers that turned out to use the same upstream provider.

MR. REED: Ms. Ortiz, the review hold you recommended. Did it have costs?

MS. ORTIZ: It missed attacks in testing. They spread before review could occur.

MR. REED: So the legal review was not the only reason to remove it.

MS. ORTIZ: No. We were choosing between actual failures. I preferred one set. The director approved another.

MR. REED: If the September traffic was a genuine attack, could waiting have endangered patients?

MS. ORTIZ: Yes.

MR. REED: Could the absence of further infections mean your system stopped them?

MS. ORTIZ: Yes. We preserved what reached our sensors. We can’t preserve a transmission we prevented from happening.

MR. REED: Has anyone established that you acted on a lure?

MS. ORTIZ: No.

THE COURT: Before you step down. The settings that operated in September. Are they still in use?

MS. ORTIZ: Yes. We built a candidate replacement that would have held September for review. In replay it misses two confirmed attacks that the current settings contained. One of them reached a water utility before containment. I’m not recommending that we install it.

THE COURT: So the settings that cut off the hospitals are the settings that stopped the water utility.

MS. ORTIZ: Yes.

Witness excused.

THE COURT: Your next witness?

MS. SHAW: Mr. Park. Before he comes up, one point about the government’s memorandum. It calls the agency the accountable alternative to private action. But nothing in Hoover would let these hospitals compel a timely response.

THE COURT: Mr. Reed?

MR. REED: The opinion created no such duty. That is expressly stated.

MS. SHAW: Nor does it give them a right to compensation simply because no effective response was available.

MR. REED: Correct. Nor did the United States ask the Supreme Court to make the availability of a necessity defense turn on the agency’s deployment decisions.

MS. SHAW: At argument the government said that if the agency failed to act, the remedy was clemency.

MR. REED: After conviction. Mr. Hoover has that avenue.

MS. SHAW: He applied in 2030. It’s pending.

THE COURT: The opinion warned that the government could not foreclose necessity by pointing to a channel incapable of timely action. It did not give a hospital a right to demand service. We are not going to construct a hypothetical civil action. Call Mr. Park.

ELI PARK, having been duly sworn, testified as follows:

MS. SHAW: What do you do?

MR. PARK: Refrigeration. Supermarket systems, mostly. You mean the computers?

MS. SHAW: Yes.

MR. PARK: I run honeypots. Traps, basically. Machines that look easy to break into. You record what tries. A few hundred of us compare captures.

THE COURT: You’re the “swarm chasers.”

MR. PARK: Some people still call us that.

MS. SHAW: You recorded both incidents?

MR. PARK: A working copy in 2028. It took over my trap and started looking for the next machine. In September I got the opening exchange. Then the route went down.

MS. SHAW: What is TALLOW?

MR. PARK: Repair software. Finds a hole, goes in through it, closes it. There are lots of those now. People don’t replace a router because the manufacturer stopped answering email.

THE COURT: The owners ask for these repairs?

MR. PARK: Sometimes there’s a sign-up. TALLOW wasn’t a sign-up one.

MS. SHAW: Mr. Hoover wrote it?

MR. PARK: The first version. The September one used his greeting, different signing key. That doesn’t tell you who sent it. You can copy a greeting.

MS. SHAW: What made you suspicious about September?

MR. PARK: The agency published a sample attack so people could test their reports. September’s traffic copied it. All eight probes, same order, same gaps between them. Two were for a kind of machine my honeypot had already said it wasn’t.

MS. SHAW: Why would it do that?

MR. PARK: If you wanted the agency’s system to call something an attack, you’d know that one worked. You could get a hospital cut off without breaking into it.

THE COURT: Just by sending those probes?

MR. PARK: Enough people like me have to see the traffic and report it. Then the provider does the actual cutting off. The hospital can be patched. It can refuse every connection. Still gets cut off if it’s inside the range.

MS. SHAW: Did you recover a payload?

MR. PARK: Not at my place. A fellow in Ohio got past the greeting. His carrier wasn’t part of the shutdown. What he received closed the hole and left a repair notice.

MS. SHAW: Anything harmful?

MR. PARK: Nothing he found. But his machines are decoys. Those addresses are on public lists of research honeypots.

MR. REED: So that doesn’t tell you what a hospital would have received.

MR. PARK: No.

MR. REED: That sample was published so researchers could test their reports before submitting them?

MR. PARK: Yes.

MR. REED: It uses ordinary vulnerability checks. A repair program could reuse those checks to determine what needed fixing.

MR. PARK: Yes. Copy the whole example and don’t bother taking out the checks you don’t need. People do that.

MR. REED: So your capture could show a repair program doing exactly what its author intended.

MR. PARK: It could. I put that in my post. People keep cutting off that part.

MR. REED: Mr. Hoover built TALLOW to enter machines without permission.

MR. PARK: That’s how TALLOW worked.

MR. REED: So anyone who takes it over has a fleet that already knows how to break in.

MR. PARK: Yes. A whole fleet may take updates from one place. Get control of that and they’ll install what you send. Another worm can find the update server the same way it finds a router.

MR. REED: We renew our objection to his 2028 capture. It was excluded at trial because the original drive was missing.

MR. PARK: Lost the drive. Kept the file. You got logs from the other traps. That’s what Ms. Ortiz was talking about.

THE COURT: I can consider it at sentencing. The objection goes to weight. The independently obtained records are a separate matter.

MR. REED: Mr. Park, have you seen these repair programs cause damage?

MR. PARK: Of course. Two agents come along, each thinks the other one’s change is the vulnerability. Back and forth till the box won’t boot. Or you close the port the owner uses to get in. Very secure now. Nobody can use it.

THE COURT: Who operates TALLOW now?

MR. PARK: We don’t know. We still see copies checking for instructions and getting replies. We don’t know what’s at the other end.

Witness excused.

THE COURT: Mrs. Bell, you may come forward.

MRS. BELL: Do I swear?

THE COURT: You’re making a statement. You don’t have to.

MRS. BELL: I’d rather.

ANNE BELL was sworn.

MRS. BELL: My husband was Peter Bell. He was sixty-three. The letter says sixty-four because his birthday was that week.

He was at the small hospital in Dunley. They’d done the scan and decided he needed the other hospital. Then the other hospital couldn’t get the scan. The doctor there needed to see it before they could decide where to take him. They tried sending it a different way. I don’t know the names of the ways.

The lights stayed on. People ask me that. The machines in his room were working. A nurse was making calls from her own phone. Somebody went to find a disc. There was a cupboard full of discs and no one could get the computer to write on one.

They did get him transferred. He died that evening. The review says the delay reduced his chance. That’s the wording they gave me. I can’t tell you he’d be here if it hadn’t happened.

He kept asking whether I should move the car. We’d parked in the short-stay spaces.

THE COURT: Take your time.

MRS. BELL: I don’t need to stop. I’ve lost my place.

Here. The hospital’s insurer says the government did it. It also says the hospital may not have kept its computers up to date, and the hospital says it did, and there’s a list. The company carrying the internet says it followed instructions. The company that wrote the scoring says it supplied a tool and the agency chose the numbers. The government says the decision was protected. I have a different letter for each.

I asked whether anyone was disputing the four hours. Nobody is. I thought that would help.

THE COURT: Do you have a lawyer helping you with these letters?

MRS. BELL: Yes. The letters are in the blue folder. He said to bring all of them.

MS. SHAW: May we mark the government’s response? We’ve supplied a copy to Mr. Reed.

MR. REED: No objection to marking it. It concerns claims outside this proceeding.

MS. SHAW: It relies on the discussion in Hoover of property that would have been lost anyway. Paragraph nine states, “Absent evidence that particular systems fell outside the threatened class, the verified containment determination supports denial of compensation.” The determination is the September score.

MR. REED: The government’s position is that it could act on the threatened class of systems. It did not have to establish the fate of each machine first. Under its reading of Caltex and Hoover, an owner seeking compensation must show why its property should be treated differently. The owner has the configuration records. The government doesn’t.

MS. SHAW: The hospital supplied those records. It supplied its patch history.

MR. REED: And the parties’ experts disagree about what those establish. The history includes modifications no administrator applied. The hospital calls them repairs. A system can be patched against one exploit and remain vulnerable to another.

MS. SHAW: Can they test the hospital’s patches against what was received in Ohio?

MR. REED: Yes. Whether that is what the hospital would have received is disputed. The government shouldn’t have to let an attack finish in order to preserve its defense to a compensation claim.

MS. SHAW: But under your position, without that evidence, the loss stays with the hospital.

MR. REED: If it cannot otherwise establish its claim. The choice of threshold also raises a separate immunity question under Gaubert. Neither issue has been decided.

THE COURT: And neither will be decided here. The complete response will be received. I am not adopting its allocation of the burden of proof.

Mrs. Bell, anything further?

MRS. BELL: His lawyer asked if I thought he should go back to prison.

THE COURT: Mr. Hoover’s lawyer?

MRS. BELL: Yes. I said I didn’t know him. I’ve learned more about him since. I still don’t know.

I don’t want my letter used to say I’ve forgiven anybody. I haven’t worked out who I’m supposed to forgive.

THE COURT: The record will reflect that.

MRS. BELL: And sixty-three.

THE COURT: Yes.

Brief recess.

THE COURT: The loss objections. Replacement costs are removed where the equipment resumed functioning. Documented interruption and restoration expenses total $126,480. Agreed?

MR. REED: Yes, Your Honor.

MS. SHAW: Yes. The additional amount at item seventeen is an invoice one business received last month for repairs attributed to TALLOW. It paid through the link in the invoice. There’s no record of what was repaired or how it relates to the 2028 flood.

THE COURT: Excluded. Nothing from September is included. Mr. Reed, argument on sentence.

MR. REED: The defendant’s intentions do not settle this case. The same judgment appears in his earlier repair software: he had the ability to enter other people’s systems, and he decided that was sufficient.

Congress protected defensive measures on systems owned by the defender, or used with consent. Mr. Hoover’s targets had not consented. Section 1030’s exception for lawfully authorized government activity did not authorize him either.

There is evidence that the flood slowed the worm. There is also evidence it obstructed repairs. He had no basis to determine the balance across hundreds of thousands of machines. A private actor cannot acquire that authority by making an estimate and starting a clock.

The September response may have been unlawful. There are proceedings to determine that. It does not follow that he was entitled to act in 2028.

MS. SHAW: We asked for an instruction, not authority over the internet. A jury could have heard all those objections and convicted him.

THE COURT: Ms. Shaw, address his conduct since release.

MS. SHAW: He submitted an accurate report in September through an approved account. No unauthorized intervention. No violation of his conditions. The government agrees.

MR. REED: We do.

MS. SHAW: We ask for time served.

THE COURT: Mr. Hoover, you have a right to speak before I impose sentence. Is there anything you wish to say?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

I read the letters. Some of them a few times. I don’t dispute what they say happened. It wasn’t supposed to— But I ran the flood for seventeen minutes. I keep going back to the logs. Seventeen minutes.

I still think it helped.

TALLOW was different. There wasn’t a ninety-second clock when I wrote it. I sent warnings to owners and most went to addresses nobody read. So I wrote something that could do the repair. I put the number of repairs on the project page.

When I stopped maintaining it, I posted a notice. Archived the code. Someone removed the stop date. I don’t know who. The greeting in September is a string I wrote. I wish that told me more.

THE COURT: Do you retain access to those machines?

THE DEFENDANT: Not that I know of. I gave probation the keys I had. Some won’t work now. Other agents change the locks.

MS. SHAW: The compliance report addresses that.

THE COURT: Continue.

THE DEFENDANT: In September I sent the sample. I didn’t run anything against the machines. There was a green check. Containment successful. I took a picture for Ruth to show I’d followed the conditions.

Then people started reporting they couldn’t reach the hospitals. I went back to the ticket. There wasn’t a button to say stop. There was a place to add information. I wrote that the range included a hospital. I wrote it again with the name in capitals.

THE COURT: Did you call?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes. The number on the receipt. They asked for the ticket number. I read it wrong the first time. It’s a long number and I was shaking.

She was trying to help. She couldn’t restore a route. I asked for someone who could. She said they were already reviewing it.

I’d asked for a system like this. On appeal, people asked what I wanted the government to do, and I said they should have something fast enough that I wouldn’t have to decide. I said that on television.

I didn’t know what they’d build. I was glad they were building it.

THE COURT: Anything further?

THE DEFENDANT: I’m still looking for a capture from a working network. Through the approved accounts. Someone outside the blocked ranges might have one.

MRS. BELL: Could he send it to me if he finds it?

THE COURT: Counsel can arrange that.

MRS. BELL: I won’t understand it.

MS. SHAW: We’ll include an explanation.

MRS. BELL: The actual thing as well, please. I’ve got somewhere to keep it.

THE COURT: Mr. Hoover, remain standing.

I find that you acted in 2028 to prevent what you believed would be greater harm. There is credible evidence that your intervention gave some operators time to protect their systems. It also caused the losses we have agreed today.

The Supreme Court’s disposition binds this court. It does not require me to treat the reporting service as faster than the evidence shows it was. I will not increase your sentence for failing to obtain a timely response that the service did not provide to the other reporters.

Your conduct since release supports a sentence below the advisory range calculated in the revised report. Having considered that range and the statutory factors, I impose time served, followed by two years of supervised release. Restitution is $126,480, allocated in the amended judgment. No fine. The existing assessment remains due. Payments begin at fifty dollars a month, subject to review as your earnings change.

The monitoring conditions permit paid work and research on systems you own or are authorized to use. No unauthorized access or modification of other systems. Counsel, have you resolved the reporting condition?

MS. SHAW: No. We object to requiring him to submit suspected imminent threats directly to the automated gateway. We propose reporting to a designated analyst instead.

MR. REED: That recreates the delay we’ve spent the morning discussing. He is asking to continue research in which he may be among the first people to observe an attack. The condition requires accurate reporting to the agency. It doesn’t make him responsible for its response.

MS. SHAW: May he at least request review before containment?

MR. REED: He can state his uncertainty in the report, as he did in September. The agency determines how to act on it.

MS. SHAW: Then we ask you to delete the affirmative reporting condition. It isn’t reasonably related to the offense or his history, and it’s a greater deprivation of liberty than deterrence or public protection requires. Keep the monitoring and the prohibition on unauthorized intervention. He can comply with both without being required to submit a report that may trigger containment.

THE COURT: I’m retaining a reporting condition because of the circumstances of this offense. Mr. Hoover observed an emergency, decided the agency couldn’t help, and acted on other people’s systems. If he continues this research during supervision, I want him to have a required step before he reaches that decision again. Reporting gives the agency a chance to respond. He remains free to explain why he thinks its response is wrong.

MS. SHAW: The work he is qualified to return to is monitoring networks. This condition will apply to his employment as well as his own research.

THE COURT: I understand. I will narrow it to credible indications of imminent serious harm observed in that work. Submit without avoidable delay through the designated service. He is not required to certify that an attack exists. He is required to report accurately what he has observed. I will not condition that report on the availability of an analyst.

The objection is preserved.

Mr. Hoover, do you understand the condition?

THE DEFENDANT: The same account?

THE COURT: Unless probation notifies you of a replacement. Retain the acknowledgment of each submission.

THE DEFENDANT: (Inaudible.)

THE COURT: Mr. Hoover?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

THE COURT: You retain the right to appeal this sentence. Ms. Shaw will discuss the deadline with you. Anything further?

MS. SHAW: No, Your Honor.

THE COURT: We are adjourned.

THE DEFENDANT: Ruth?

MS. SHAW: Yes.

THE DEFENDANT: Can we just sit here a minute?

MS. SHAW: Of course.

Recording ends at 11:52 a.m.

Author’s Note

The internet is having a very bad cybersecurity day, or possibly entering a very bad cybersecurity stretch of indeterminate length. AI has gotten very good at finding and building working exploits for security flaws in software. It may soon get very good at rapidly exploiting those flaws as well, setting up botnets based on zero-day flaws faster than human systems can respond.

Recent reports describe both coordinated defensive efforts and AI-assisted attacks already in operation. The “swarm chasers” reference comes from The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on people investigating rogue AI.

In a world of fast, capable AI botnets, it may make sense for governments to set up automated systems to defend against worms in real time, possibly without permission of the owners of the affected systems. And it may be tempting for individuals to take action on their own. A Good (or reckless?) Samaritan running their own autonomous swarm could potentially patch neglected insecure systems for a long time without detection, and for all we know already is. There is precedent for both private individuals and government officials acting under court authorization removing malware from other people’s systems.

This raises some interesting legal questions: is there a defense of necessity for a private individual who takes action to prevent imminent harm to computer systems? Could exigent circumstances justify a government agency’s warrantless intrusion into computer systems? If it damages those systems to protect others, when must it pay compensation?

We’ve grappled with questions like those in cases involving fires or wartime destruction of property. But how persuasive is an urgency rationale if the response is configured months in advance, and an AI “spring gun” decides when the emergency has arrived?

I created this story to feel out some possible answers to those questions at their most uncomfortable. The story was generated through a series of dialogues with Claude Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, and GPT-6 Astra — as well as with Opus 4.8 when an automated safety guardrail worried that I might be trying to trick Opus 5.5 into helping me hack a computer system.

Thanks to my sister, Emma Cushman, for inspiration and discussion. Emma’s curiosity about exigent circumstances and AI botnets inspired the story, and I used two artifacts Emma generated as prompts — a fictional email exchange (PDF) and legal research session (PDF) from the Supreme Court decision referred to in the transcript.

A hat tip also to Adam Unikowsky, whose Not Anymore story earlier this week pushed me over the line to building out an imaginary future as a way to think about AI and legal challenges.

The hearing, the Hoover decision, and the containment program are fictional; the legal authorities cited by name are real.