Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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While I understand your sentiment I think these crimes are silly in comparison to the crimes perpetrated in all our names in for instance Iraq and Afghanistan and I can't help but notice that when it comes to stuff like this the justice department is very eager to do something about it but war crimes in general go unpunished.

Tony Blair, George Bush and a whole slew of others have committed far worse crimes than to cost MC or PayPal a couple of hours of downtime and they're still walking around free and are nominated for all kinds of prizes. The sense of injustice the existence of something like Gitmo gives me is much stronger in comparison to the part of me that thinks that script kiddies should be brought to justice (or at a minimum stopped).

Besides this action having no net positive effect for WikiLeaks, the article cited above already pushes the notion that these attacks were in revenge for Assanges arrest and that is precisely the wrong signal to send.

Please don't turn this into a debate about Iraq, Bush, and our evil government. That's neither here nor there at the moment. Visa and Mastercard are not any of the forementioned and the people who DDoSed them commited a crime, plain and simple. The cost to PayPal etc is not known, but you can bet they (and their many customers) didn't deserve the "wrath" of these kids. I still think they should be brought to justice. What if you and your property suddenly came into the Internet mob's sites?

I think it is very appropriate to drag Bush and the evil government in to it because if it weren't for that we wouldn't be having this massive support for wikileaks. The two are far more connected than you might think.

Without the evil empire to play underdog to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks would be seen as a bunch of two bit hackers, now they are at the forefront of a movement that claims to want to improve society by enforcing greater transparency.

Support is emailing your senator, or doing _anything else_ other than commiting crimes. I don't see why this is turning into Tupac.

I haven't decided how I feel about this, but emailing your senator is likely to accomplish absolutely nothing, so perhaps more severe behaviour is somewhat understandable.

But remember who the action is towards. Private organizations. Not the government. Just private organizations who chose to disassociate themselves with another private organization. When you step outside of this media frenzy/bubble we're all in that's what it boils down to. Then some people didn't like that and they committed a crime against PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard.

Not just private organizations, but multi-national mega-corporations at the center of our financial system, with coffers that rival most nations GDP's, and, as Wikileaks has shown, a direct line to the most powerful governments in the world.

So I think equating the targets of these virtual sit-ins with any private organization, like a small start-up with 5 employees, isn't really telling the whole story.

How many packets are a crime? I understand if you want to arrest the RBNs of the world, but unfortunately it's more frequently some random person who are made an example of. I don't think the question is if what these people did was wrong, but if it's reasonable to punish them for it.

Just one person walking in to a store: not a problem. Just one person blocking the door to that store: problem.

The number of actors and / or actions are not the criteria by which this will be judged, but their intent.

Your comment would have been more valuable if you had left the toxic political barbs out of it; I say that as a liberal opposed to the war in Iraq. This comment made me groan out loud.

The inevitable meta-argument that is going to result from me pointing this out will also be annoying and it will also prompt groans, but at least we'll be arguing about something relevant to Hacker News: whether "off-topic: most politics" actually means anything.

Strange that as "a liberal opposed to the war in Iraq", you and the other binary thinkers here want to advance the argument that the actions of people like Assange and these anonymous "hackers" are taking place in a vacuum unfilled by the miasma of absolutely unconscionable actions taken over the last decade by U.S. neo-conservatives.

The American conservative element, endlessly on the wrong side of history, whose own policies have a great hand in fostering terrorism, whose own policies have brought the economy to its knees, absolutely needs its filthy little secrets.

Exactly how long do you want people to remain in milque-toast-mode before taking more direct action?

Indeed. The first step to world peace is taking out PayPal.

Careful, plenty of people on HN probably thought that before anyone at Paypal had even heard of WL.

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