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Comment by Fargoan | Hacker News Reader

The owner of the account is a stalker attempting to extort his victim. Why hasn't he been banned? If I were to make an account tracking a random person's movement I'd likely be banned. Why should it be treated differently when the stalking victim is a celebrity?

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Just to play Devil's Advocate, the account is only tracking the movement of Elon's jet, not Elon himself. I don't know if you can consider that 'stalking' when, different to a private car, the movement of private planes is still somewhat public information.

I know this. If I were to track movements of a car around a city and call the account KarensCar and try and extort her in exchange for shutting down the account it wouldn't be any different than what this guy is doing to Musk.

Is the Twitter user extorting Musk?

Indeed.

> “I go like, Oh my gosh, Elon Musk just DM’d me: ‘Can you take this down? It’s a security risk,’” Mr. Sweeney said. “Then he offered me $5,000 to take it down and help him make it slightly harder for ‘crazy people to track me.’”

[...]

> Mr. Sweeney made a counteroffer to Mr. Musk, according to the screenshots of the exchange, saying that he would abandon the account if Mr. Musk upped the ante to $50,000. He said that he would also accept a Tesla Model 3, an electric car that costs more than $38,000, adding that he was joking.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/technology/elon-musk-jet-...

That's not what extortion is. (Or stalking, for that matter).

>Indeed.

He received an offer to shut it down, then countered the offer. Then said he was joking. You're not a lawyer, by chance?

Or if someone personally canceled the Tesla order of a Tesla critic which he has done at least once. For all his talk about free speech without limits he doesn't really practice it.

If the location of Karen’s car is publicly tracked and available, then it’s exactly like the Elon Musk plane situation.

However, Karen’s car is not required to have a transponder, so the location of it isn’t public information. Therefore, it’s actually nothing like the Elon Musk plane situation. Hope this helps!

Karen's car drives and parks on public streets. It has an identification number posted on it. The information is out there for everyone to see. It's not as easy to automate as a transponder, but it's not necessarily private.

And I just pointed out to you that the movement of private planes is already far more public than the movement of private cars, and for good reasons. The account isn't (as far as I know, I've never looked at it) actually doing their own tracking; they are simply (I assume) collating public information from air traffic control authorities, etc.

Karen‘s car is not publishing updates about her current location on a public radio frequency which everyone can receive.

I'm not completely sure that's true these days.

... it isn't.

Aircraft transponders, which are legally required to broadcast on public frequencies, aren't remotely similar to whatever cell based surveillance trickery you're thinking of.

Flights are public information. Cars are not. Are you seriously such a fanboy of Elon that you have to pretend to be offended by someone sharing public information that anyone can google and get in 3 clicks? If the 1% doesn't want their private flight info to be shared, then they can just take a normal flight like the rest of us.

No, I'm not a fan boy. I just think it's ridiculous that people are ok with this. I know it's very easy to look up flight data. But looking up flight data and making a Twitter account dedicated to a private plane's movement and then trying to extort the owner is different.

No-one is defending the owner of the account asking for more money in response to Elon asking them to take it down and offering some compensation. However, they didn't take the initiative to approach Elon first and ask for money for removal of the account, and their responses to Elon can be read as just (immature) bravado. So your accusation of 'extortion' looks to me as overhyped as your accusation of 'stalking'.

This sort of repression of free speech is a very slippery slope. It starts with publicly stating the location of Elon's private jet becoming a crime, and ends with a dictator in control of the world's most powerful armed forces.

What are you even talking about? Nobody said anything about a crime. I'm just surprised Twitter hasn't banned the kid.

Your description of the account holder :

> The owner of the account is a stalker attempting to extort his victim.

Extortion is a criminal offense and stalking can also be one, depending on its severity. So that means you're the one who brought crime into the discussion (with wrongful accusations, in my view).

Or take a friend's jet? Or rent one? There are a lot of ways to travel via plane that don't broadcast your body's location.

Flights are clearly not public information. I cannot look up where you've been flying on regular airlines recently and that's how it works for virtually everyone.

Reality is, governments and the airline industry could make this system be sufficiently private if they wanted, or at least a lot harder to abuse. There's no particular reason personal details of jet owners have to be linked to the radio transponders.

>If I were to make an account tracking a random person's movement I'd likely be banned.

He's not tracking a person's movement. He's tracking a vehicle, via public information, traveling through public airspace.

With opinions like these coming from the Elon army, Twitter is going to get worse.

Ok, so if I track your car driving on public roads and post it on Twitter it's cool?

Elon army? Where did you get that from?

It's not extortion to respond to an offer from that person to accept a sum of money to take that information down. Nor is it extortion to negotiate on the sum.

He hasn’t been banned because despite your claims it is neither stalking nor extortion.

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