Weev threatens prosecutors with info from Ashley Madison leaks
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Basically, the threat unpacks to "I'm going to use the fact that I'm newsworthy to make already-public information more public by putting it in the news." To which I would suggest that our clickbait-driven, eyeball-obsessed media should find it ethical to decline to participate in such shenanigans. Though my phrasing should suggest what I consider the odds of that to be. They really shouldn't even have run this, and, well, they did, didn't they?
This dude is hella salty. If we wanted to make change he should try to change legislation.
It went nowhere.
Legislation will not work. Only violence will.
The story becomes 'people who think x are violent terrorists' and all of a sudden no one wants to admit they think x, or even discuss x from a rational standpoint. Everyone will just remember the violence.
Perhaps not, though. Bill Ayers still ended up in a position of powerful political influence and mainstream academic acceptance even after he and his associates in the Weather Underground committed a number of terrorist bombings. If your ideological clique ends up in a position of significant state influence, you'll be forgiven your crimes, even if the state is not replaced in its totality.
In a bit more detail: You're the loser with 99% probability. The only way you're going to win is by having an amazing plan, or getting amazingly lucky, or most likely some of both.
That leaves two options: You lose and get crushed, or you don't make any change and it's irrelevant. For the rest of the world, it's better that you be in the second category, because you cause less damage that way.
And, in fact, I think you are in the second category. You're talking big about "destroy[ing] the current state and creat[ing] a new one", about how "only violence will [work]." And what's your violence? You're publicizing the Ashley Madison info of people who you're mad at. Pathetic.
But, in fact, I prefer pathetic big-talker do-nothings in this area, because they cause a smaller body count.
It's different being a name on a list of millions of names and being aggressively singled out. The latter is effective, the former is not.
I'm actually aware of that, and carefully did not claim otherwise. I don't question the effectiveness of that part of the strategy.
(I do question the ethics, but, well, I'm sure that doesn't surprise anybody, including you. I say this mostly so I don't get a followup from someone conflating my belief in its effectiveness with my belief in its ethicalness. But, yes, I would expect this to be effective. It's also something that will get progressively less effective over time as more people do it, and I also think there is no chance that nobody else will do this, equally publicly. Privately I'm sure it's already been done, of course.)
But on the other hand maybe that's too much to ask of a man who was imprisoned for 3 years.
Before the whole hacking charges thing happened, he was mostly known for being a vocal misogynist and antisemite. He has a history of doxxing women, too (even to the point of posting Kathy Sierra's social security number online).