Info Pioneer

T he Frenchman who hacked into the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama and Britney Spears claims he is a “kind pirate” hoping to expose poor internet security. Francois Cousteix, an unemployed 23-year-old from France, describes himself as a “kind pirate” who used low-tech methods of guessing passwords, often aided by info on the Facebook pages of Twitter employees. “I am not a hacker,” he tells AFP. “I did not act with a destructive aim. I wanted to warn them, to show up the faults in the system.” Local prosecutor Jean-Yves Coquillat agreed: “He is not a hacker in the classic sense. He entered a house whose door had been left open.” Cousteix says he attacked Twitter and high-profile users like Obama and Britney Spears to show “that big companies are no more secure than any Internet user. That’s the message I wanted to get across.” This is not the first time Francois has been in trouble with the law. Last year he was given a suspended eight-month prison sentence and a small fine for gambli...