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Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

I’ve seen ads for buying small quantities of elements including selling a full periodic table. We probably all have. I wonder how many of us on HN could have been in this poor guy’s position.

The writeup makes it sounds typically Australian in a massive law enforcement overreaction over something innocent and minimal.

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Beyond a person's life being turned upside down, one also has to wonder how much this investigation and "major hazmat incident" cost taxpayers.

Would have been easier too, just to send a car to the kid's house to knock on the door. Here in the US cops would do it for the PR, sometimes.

They could have just kept it at customs and sent a letter saying it's illegal and let that be the end of it.

Whoever was involved in creating a circus out of it should be fired.

Thank you, Canada. Your position is common sense and level-headed.

When you say it like that it is so obvious. If we collectively kept our heads out of our asses and just thought how to deescalate things rather than be parsimonious little nobodies we would all be better.

The other day somebody said I could not join a huge table in a coworking space because there was a meeting. Private meeting tables or rooms are paid and require reservation and that table was in the common area. I got annoyed because the guy did not ask if I could wait and go to another table, instead he just matter of fact told me they were having a meeting and would rather I would not sit in the free seats. I told him that I believe this was a public usage table, to which he then asked if I could allow them to remain alone. I considered being a prick but then I considered, what would be the gain of antagonising a dude that also goes there often and all for the pleasure of sitting in my favourite table? I stewed a bit but the next day I forgot it. If I had confronted him I would be reminded of the incident every time I crossed the guys path.

In Australia, most major criminal matters are handled at the state level.

The Commonwealth Director of Prosecutions has form for this. They don't do much other than welfare fraud cases, and so when they get a brief that's actually interesting for a change, they tend to go full ham.

Whether it's actually in the public interest for them to prosecute isn't a factor they seem to give much consideration.

Another recent fiasco caused by their heavy handedness: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/...

>Another recent fiasco caused by their heavy handedness: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/...

"He spent three months in custody before he was granted bail in October 2022, after an earlier bail was revoked because he failed to comply with conditions."

a 13 year old with autism "failed to comply with conditions".

That kid stated he tried to contact ISIS, had pledged allegiance to the current ISIS leader, expressed a desire to be an ISIS recruiter, and to build and detonate a bomb at a government building. (June 2021).

It looks like he was searched on 6 October 2021 and granted bail on 8 October.

I don't know what the conditions of his bail were, but when it was revoked in June 2022, his

  Google searches involved topics such as “10 ways to cover up a murder”, “how to murder”, “16 steps to kill someone and not get caught” and references to a schoolteacher.
  
  https://www.childrenscourt.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-01/Application%20for%20bail%20by%20Carrick%20%28a%20pseudonym%29%20%5B2022%5D%20VChC%204.pdf

Damn, why didn't they prosecute that instead? Probably would have won some public support. Declarations of a desire to commit violence are an entirely different beast than purchasing plutonium, and far more worth prosecuting.

The 13 year old ISIS supporter is a different person than the 24 year old plutonium science nerd. You're discussing a different person than TFA was about.

That exactly sounds like some unhealthy obsession of a mentally unhealthy individual. It should be treated as mental disease, not as a crime, especially given the age and already established medical condition of autism.

And that's how it was being treated by the state police, before the feds engaged the kid online, and actively and deliberately undermined his rehabilitation.

Surely there's some sort of safeguard in the Australian government preventing this sort of embarrassment. The second anyone hears how much was involved they're gonna know this prosecution makes a mockery of their own laws.

Such ads are common for uranium, which is less dangerous and thus less restricted. Plutonium is extremely illegal and not included in any periodic table collection I've ever seen.

From the collections of elements that I’ve seen, they’d likely include some uranium in that slot, with a note that there’s a chance of trace amounts of plutonium present from natural decay.

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