Adam Savader, at only age 22, has demonstrated that he has enormous talent, along with a serious mental illness.  The odd mix, along with the New Yorker's penchant for stalking Michigan students, has landed him in federal prison for 30-months.

It is uncommon to hear names like Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Bill Clinton invoked at a sentencing hearing.  Yet that's what went down in Judge Marianne Battani's courtroom in the United States District Court here in Detroit last week.

Savader, a campaign volunteer for Newt Gingrich, sank into a deep depression when that campaign fell apart in 2012.  So he took-up cyberstalking Michigan college co-eds; hacking into their digital files and extracting nude photos, then texting demands for more photos of the victims under the threat that he would transmit the pics he extracted to their relatives.

To do this, the man from Great Neck, NY, used an alias in conjunction with a Google phone service. He bullied one young woman with the following text threat:

You have until noon. I am not bluffing. Don't be stupid. Once I send pics of you, they cannot be unsent.

Now, Savader has plenty of time to re-think such aggressive cyberthreats.

Recognizing that posting nude pics of oneself is legal, Judge Battani wondered aloud why young women were motivated to do so, thereby setting themselves up for hackers like Savader.  At his sentencing hearing, Savader quoted Bill Clinton, while his lawyer invoked letters written on Savader's behalf [long before his cyberstalking charges were filed] from the manager of Newt Gingrich's campaign, and U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, acknowledging the felon's hard work on the Gingrich and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns.

We here at the Law Blogger heartily agree with Judge Batanni's warning: think twice about posting nude pics of yourself on-line.  Guys like Adam Savader are out there in cyberspace, lurking like a ghost ready to pounce.

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