[sophacles]

No you don't. Those folks are a different class of people than you, a better class, a class that deserves privacy - us peons aren't important enough to have to worry about that stuff.

That's what they'll argue anyway. They'll use different words, but whatever words they use will carry that message.

[cmurf]

Privacy isn't a right. It's a product you buy. Rich people are better. They deserve more and better versions of all products: Justice, education, health care...

[gruez]

Defeatist attitude aside, what would happen if we crowd funded a wikileaks-type organization that operates "as an ISP" and doxxed politicians/lobbyists/lawyers/isp executives?

[_jal]

> what would happen if we crowd funded a wikileaks-type organization

Hard to say with any certainty, but there is the case of the founder of a certain Wikileaks-type organization currently playing out that you might want to look at...

[sneak]

You’d go to jail like weev did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev

AT&T put hundreds of thousands of subscriber emails on the web with no password or firewall or meaningful authentication of any kind. (They were server-sent autocompleted values in the username field of a login form that had a sequential integer URL argument.) He and a conspirator downloaded them all and sent them to the media to run stories about AT&T’s negligence (instead of, say, selling or publishing the list, or emailing them malware, et c).

He did a few years in federal, mostly in solitary.

I witnessed the terrible effects it had on his health and psyche. He was never the same person again after he got out. Solitary confinement is torture.

sophocles is right. There are two sets of laws in America, and the bigger one applies to you and not them. If you don’t show sufficient respect for their authority and the more restrictive set of rules they apply to your lower-status group, they will stretch their own rules to the point where you will be railroaded and subsequently tortured.

[SkyBelow]

Is there a better example of this than Epstein? To get away with one of the worst crimes for decades and once caught, to get a penalty that would be considered a slap on the wrist for tax evasion or drug possession, much less what he did.

There are teenagers who were dating someone with a slightly too large age gap who spent far more time in prison than Epstein did.

[fl0wenol]

Please let's not use weev as a cautionary tale.

The guy had been baiting people to clock him in the face for his anti-social behavior on the internet since forever. I don't think it was what he did to AT&T that got him sent up, he'd been on the feds' radar since at least the Sarah Palin email hack.

[sneak]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

Perfect example of a guy just a little bit too far outside of the circle to get away with ignoring the inner party’s mandates.

They cooked up some insider trading to throw him in federal, too. He’s out now, I understand.

[etrabroline]

If the government doesn't have enough evidence to convict you they shouldn't be allowed to trump up some other bogus charge and defend their unfair treatment by saying "well we wanted to get him on this other charge..."

[howlin]

It's pretty clear the crime here was unauthorized access to the server, not the sending of the information on to the media.

[mcny]

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev

> It's pretty clear the crime here was unauthorized access to the server, not the sending of the information on to the media.

I think this is a good place as any to reassert that the CFAA is irrepairable and irredeemable at this point and MUST be scrapped with no replacement.

[mrguyorama]

Why should you be allowed to muck around on my computers without authorization from me?

[Retric]

Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison, of which he served approximately 13 months before the conviction was vacated by a higher court. That’s not several years.

[sneak]

He was in jail (holding in Essex County jail in NJ) for the second ~half of the trial as well, as even before he was convicted, he was stripped of many rights and due to FBI harassment of all potential employers was unable to support himself to their standards.

[glitchc]

The Wiki article makes it hard to feel bad for this guy.

[alfromspace]

If someone becomes a NAZI after being tossed in jail for no good reason, well hey, fuck em'.

How about we stop justifying hurting people because of their (in this case retroactive) violations of social/political norms and worry more about if our society itself is tolerable and is, in fact, sometimes perfectly deserving of extreme reactions.

[kazagistar]

Agreed, especially because the jail is the psychological harm that triggers a lot of follow up awfulness for people.

[krapp]

No. Society doesn't need to worry about whether it's tolerant enough of "nazis" (or any hateful, violent, extremist ideologues), nor do we all need to realize that our collective failure to be adequately sympathetic towards "nazis" justifies their extremism. The "nazis" are not the real victims here. They deserve the social and political punishment they get.

[SkyBelow]

>They deserve the social and political punishment they get.

If the "they" are the people supporting the punishment and torture of someone for reporting on corporate incompetence, and the manner of punishment is extremism, then your rationale leads to the extremism you want to punish. By this rationale, society deserves the extremism it gives rise to through its treatment of individuals who were not extremist before the treatment.

[alfromspace]

This is all just supposed to be self-evident? What even are you talking about? Be specific.

[wbl]

I remember when the phone company doxxed everybody!