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Comment by coderdude | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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