The boy who stole Half-Life 2 (2011)

The treatment this individual would have suffered and the mal-incentivized justice system in the US where high profile cases and large $ amounts make great news headlines and careers for junior-level agents splashing across the ticket taper screens of 24-hour news networks and social media feeds is awful. But the social agenda as spoon fed top down isn’t deliberately aimed at the outcome this kid would have faced in the US.

That outcome would have been kafkaesque but still just a product of shitty incentives at various socio-cultural levels. That would have made him an outlier, one of a few dozens of individuals abused in this way. Horrific, yes, and to be held up against progressive values of freedom as absolute failures of our systems to function properly. Exemplars of how our ostensible values sometimes— and maybe often— fail to be realized in action and fact. And even how there are still lurking undercurrents of more systemic problems that must be uprooted and dealt with.

But these failures are a whisper compared to the deliberate and overt and systematic, unflinching and unabashed abuses that occur elsewhere. Uyghurs in China are an obvious but too often ignored example.

All too often a false equivalency is made between the two ends of the spectrum, not to mention the gradations in between. In many ways it’s a paradox of freedom that we in the west are only able to be vocal about the outlier hypocrisies of our countries because we have the freedom to do so with significantly less fear of life-changing consequences.

It is… I don’t know, ironic? Tragic? Certainly inconvenient… but the exact freedoms we have in more progressive countries allow us to amplify our outlier failings on these issues to the point that more oppressive nations can use that as rhetorical ammunition and propagandistic cover for their own more deliberate and massively scaled efforts in further deliberate extremes of such efforts.

Makes perfect sense just has nothing to do with justice.

I still find Valve's response to a person admitting guilt to be pretty harsh, given that they couldn't have known about unrelated crimes.

[1] This was before the internet, before there were laws specifically about this sort of thing, and before the public started mistakenly equating "hacker" with "criminal".

I don’t know, this seems a lot more than ‘hacking’.

18 to 24 months seems about right for that IMO. Typically I am horrified at US sentencing but this doesn’t seem terrible.