The U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey
Berman, said Griffith “provided highly technical
information to North Korea, knowing that this
information could be used to help North Korea
launder money and evade sanctions.”
Griffith has contributed to the hacker magazine
2600, which tweeted that Griffith’s arrest
amounted to “an attack on all of us.”
“I kept warning him it was a trap,” the magazine’s
editor, Emmanuel Goldstein said in a separate
Twitter post, adding Griffith “insisted on”
speaking to the FBI without a lawyer. “What’s
ironic is that afterwards, he was convinced they
totally got where he was coming from.”
The U.S. and the U.N. Security Council have
imposed increasingly tight sanctions on North
Korea in recent years to try to rein in its nuclear
and ballistic missile programs. Pyongyang says
it wants the U.S. to get the sanctions lifted and
provide security guarantees before North Korea
will abandon its advancing nuclear arsenal; the
U.S. has said the North has to take substantial
steps toward denuclearization before the
sanctions will come off.
The U.S. government amended sanctions
against North Korea in 2018 to prohibit “a U.S.
person, wherever located” from exporting
technology to North Korea. Prosecutors said
Griffith acknowledged that his presentation
amounted to a transfer of technical knowledge
to conference attendees.
A self-described former hacker who went on
to get a doctorate in computer science, Griffith
became something of a tech-world enfant