The media did that with the Atlanta bombing and it destroyed a guy's life.
Vigilante justice is reckless and comes with big risks, as romantic as it may sound to some to sit in the comfort of your desk chair and bring about digital justice.
Isn't this romantic notion, bringing justice with a click the driving force of nearly every online-petition, and things like this.
Isn't this romantic notion the reason why the new demo is so often practiced? New demo = to ddos someone to mars or jupiter, and rationalize it with: I could just as easily have gone to their headquarter and demoed there?
Well most people could not have done it - and would not have done it in rain, snow, wind, driven 500 miles just to demo there, and so on.
As a lot of psychological studies showed, people saying they would do something and people doing this thing in the real world (not in their imagination) are two totally different things.
So there you have your real, underlying problem, a psychological problem, with this kind of digital activism. It is so totally different from real activism, and at the same time so new, that we really do not have proper ways as a society to deal with the dark sides of it.
The ability for one person to have that much power is either scary or empowering depending on your point of view.
Additionally, it seems some people have a hard time realizing they have polarized views of the same thing in their head. So while it may be both scary and empowering, people can have strong polarized views of the same topic without realizing it, it just depends on their point of view at the time. Maybe I was trying to get people to think and realize that such things exist in their mind, or maybe I am giving myself too much credit for an omission of words.
I guess we'd like to say accountability, but even that's not really there. Take Louis Cuen Taylor, who just spent over 40 years in prison for setting fire to a hotel, despite actually helping the police attempt to save people. After all this time, it was finally accepted that there was no evidence whatsoever that Taylor actually committed the crime. He was released after pleading No Contest, making it very difficult for him to get any sort of reparations. So yes, he was finally released, but with 4 decades of his life taken from him.
Bad things happen even with reasonable safeguards in place - cars will keep crashing even if everyone is alert and sober, yet there is still a world of difference between a drunk swerving between lanes and a sober/attentive driver.
The fact that the criminal justice system, based around impartial trials, the right to defend yourself before your charges, and the assumption of innocence, will at times ensnare innocents is not an excuse to adopt the opposite system - i.e., the assumption of guilt, mob justice, and the lack of opportunity to defend oneself.
Put more practically, the difference between bad vigilante justice and bad institutional justice is its occurrence rate. Vigilante justice frequently ensnares innocents - the other posts in this thread demonstrate this in spades, and makes wrongful convictions in the US criminal justice system look like a drop in the bucket.
Any country that has an incarceration rate 5-10x higher than most other countries ("civilized" or not), I'd be real hesitant to call their wrongful convictions a "drop in a bucket".
I'd be in agreement with that argument if it were any other country. Still, vigilante justice is (of course) not a solution for the US because if that became commonplace, it'd be even worse. Less incarcerations, but you may not like what they'd get replaced with.
That's not what I said. What I said is that miscarriages of justice in a vigilante environment would make the current US situation look like a drop in the bucket. The level of injustice that would exist in society would make people yearn for the days when we were imprisoning >1% of the country's population.
Or even more recently Ryan Lanza at Sandy Hook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Lanza#Investigation
The media doesn't learn and doesn't care to learn.
The people who turn it into a witch hunt are likely not the people actually using their heads enough to know what to be looking for in the images.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/mystery-man-on-roof...
Edit: It's another picture though.
The problem is that all it takes is one group to start quoting the other, and the effect starts to snowball:
"Internet detectives on the popular website Reddit have identified three possible suspects..."
"[Rival news organization] tonight reported on three new leads. The suspects, Joe Bloggs, Susan Smith and Bill Stickers..."
"Ask Reddit - who of the three suspects do you think is most likely to be behind the attacks?"
Christopher Jeffries http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/mar/16/christopher-jeffrie...
Oz: Lindy Chamberlain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_Chamberlain-Creighton
Countless others, and one of the reasons why death-penalties can kill the wrong person
I don't think they needed to learn anything. They know it's bad to jump the gun. You still see "Dewey Defeats Truman" jokes.
They just make mistakes. It's easy to criticize a nameless faceless concept like "the media". Individuals in the media are largely upstanding people trying to do the right thing.
With recent news about someone "watching a race while brown" (an injured Saudi's home is searched while he's being treated for injuries) I don't hold a lot of hope for accurate and careful policing.
I would say this is an absolutely worst case heat of the moment outcome. Can't claim its unrelated or irrelevant. Its a sad outcome that lots of americans automatically equate being arab with being a criminal, and its sad he got tackled after nearly being blown up, and its sad the cops trashed his house, but in the long line of human injustice, its not that bad, no one shot him or lynched him or ruined his reputation.
In a somewhat slower paced, more methodical, less emotional situation like looking at pictures of backpacks online, I think the likely outcome compared to the poor arab dude would be immensely more likely to tend toward rational wise justice than uncontrolled rabid injustice.
They are nothing more than unethical algorithmic drones, that dig up stuff. So far, no problem. But when showing their findings in public, they have a responsibility in thinking through the possible consequences, that might arise for these two guys if the (with a by the way very high probability) are innocent.
So raising the internet-pillories with possible media outlets taking these images and (not fact checking) showing them in different channels, might just destroy lives.
So yeah, sit in your chair and believe this unethical bs about them not convicting anybody. Right, the internet is just a tool.
As wise Uncle Ben once said: "With great power comes great responsibility."
That is, what seems to be missing here.
ps.: Imagine a different scenario:
They dig up these images, they send it to the law enforcement agencies. They find these guys to be potential suspects. They get a fair trial. After all is said and done . These guys come out to show what they did. Something in the line of finding a security flaw at your favorite digital place.
Isn't that almost the same thing as this, just with a higher probability that the shamed person is actually guilty of the crime?
http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/09/misconduct-is-only-news-wh...
Yeah, how about those drug offenses? Or copyright issues? Or computer fraud and abuse? Or...
Would you prefer it if copyright holders were free to exact their own "justice" outside of the court system?
They also have the super power of getting a search warrant and going through your fucking house so that they can find real evidence not just some pictures or possibly innocent people on the internet.
I don't know why I'm so pissed about these photo's but it most have something to do with the hypocrisy of HN being a group of people who hate to be watched and yet... WE are watching YOU. Seriously how are these photos any different than the government having drones? They are public? The public doesn't need to do everything and the government shouldn't be 100% open. I think this demonstrates just how bad it would be if private citizens were given the launch codes to nuclear weapons.
You are at a public event, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy and could not argue so in court.
If you are in your backyard and your neighbor is videotaping you, then that's illegal if you have the expectation of privacy. The government can basically do the same with impunity with drones without it being illegal.
See the difference?
What is true is that if you have a 12 foot fence and are in your backyard topless and your neighbor films you, then that's illegal because you had an expectation of privacy. Same goes if someone is being taped in a bathroom. You are in space that's not publicly accessible. I'm not 100% sure where the definitive case law on what is and is not private resides, but most of it is well defined in the physical world. So consider these three things: barriers (walls, space is not public), ownership (I own or are here with consent of who owns), and consent (I agreed to wave privacy rights explicity or de facto i.e. I'm walking down this street). These three things have to be ALL met or else you could tape people taking showers at your house legally.
With your apartment, things are even more gray because you don't have an absolute right to privacy there as your landlord can enter the premises under many pretenses.
But that's not the point I'm trying to make, Someone took a photo (publicly available) and found someone without a backpack, then the put it up online and said, this guy is a suspect.
Now we have a crowd of people (here on Hacker news and if you follow the threads others on Reddit) who have seen this guys face. The law of idiots leads me to believe that someone is going to recognize him and this could adversely affect his life.
Is it illegal... no. Is it morally wrong to post something like this online, I believe so. Sure, he has no right to privacy, and I'm no lawyer, but to slander someone's name with a very limited amount of evidence seems fucked up. I said it in another area, but they should have privately released this information to the police and let them investigate.
The Presumption of Innocence is actually not directly enshrined in the US constitution, and has been relaxed or reversed by the government to serve "societal needs."
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1be5xv/til_in...
Also recall this from a few years back:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/02/02/691881/-Holder-Habe...
That's just as well. It's better to let a not-so-innocent walk, than to make an innocent pay.
The very notion of justice in civilized western societies is that you DON'T need "lawless vigilantes".
And they ain't that good either. All their allure comes from BS movies, TV shows and comic books.
In real life "lawless vigilantes" are more like Southern lynching mobs.
You're playing the foll, right? If not, then I'll tell you why.
Instead of going to your neighbours house and beat him with a baseball bat when you suspect his kids did pee in your rosebuds, you should report to the police and ask for a reparation.
Why? Because we live in a society, not in a hurd. The guy with the most muscles is not supposed to be more right than the guy with less, or in a wheelchair.
The way to do this is to agree together to not use force and let an institution use force, thusly forming a "social contrat", which you have already signed at your birth.
And what if you don;t agree with this contract? You woould need to go in another place, but all of them places have such contracts, you'll be sorry to hear.
What do we have? A shit ton of people and photos of people with backpacks. This is great if you give it privately to the police so they can go out and use the rest of their tools to find stuff, but there is a reason why they don't announce their "suspects" to the public.
You're completely right. Everything was much better when the mob could just perform justice with a rope and a tree.
But a bunch of people on a forum? Will they even feel responsible for their individual small part of participation in a thread that ruins someone's life? It's very similar, psychologically, to a mob. And that's why it's so dangerous.
Law enforcement has absolutely zero legal liability for anything they do in the course of their job. Anything. This is well-settled law.
On the other hand the forum mob is legally liable for their actions.
So if your sole criterion was legal liability, we should expect greater care, consideration and accuracy from the forum mob than from law enforcement members.
Whose livelihood is threatened by participating in a 4chan thread pseudonymously?
That's not actually true, random internet anecdotes aside.http://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/cases/katrina/Human%2...
FYI: This submission is just some images pulled off a thread of idle speculation that somebody posted to Tumblr. It's not some kind of organized campaign claiming to have found the people responsible.
This is bad, and very wrong.
No, actually. We average out to the same kind of mob-prone mooks we like to tut-tut at others for being. Except our mobs are about standing around going "Well, actually..." and that's marginally less puerile than what we see from 4chan mobs.
It might feel like skepticism, but from where I sit it looks a lot like pretentious pseudo-intellectual grandstanding. It's like hanging a somebody's napkin doodle in an art gallery just so you can complain that it's not the Mona Lisa.
1. assemble the pictures
2. give sources for their pictures (an imgur link doesn't count)
3. show what evidence they think that makes the person a suspect
4. submit it to the FBI
5. not post it on the Internet
Posting it on the Internet doesn't help. The FBI will need to track down original photos, and being duplicated everywhere on the web, with a bunch of other people photoshopping comments on it in various ways, won't help their efforts.
The FBI only needs to see it once. This isn't voting. A bunch of people submitting something doesn't make it more likely to be true, or more likely to be listened to.
On another note, it's funny how people tend to focus on people who stand out, like the guy with the white baseball cap. He stands out in a sea of dark colors, so of course people focus on him. It's very hard to believe (although possible) that the actual bomber would wear clothing that makes him stand out in any way.
I fail to see how this is more applicable to the average 4chan viewer than it is to the average human being.
If there is something the US intelligence services are lacking when it comes to terrorism than it is certainly not the lack of manpower and money...
I saw this when it was new, yesterday, and it is one pic in a in a giant series of photoshops showing Dorner is responsible, and a zillion of the other usual 4chan and reddit suspects.
So I glanced at this (or one of the numerous others very similar) and at a glance said Oh LOL very funny to photoshop Moot into the pix but Moot is going to be pissed now. At closer glance today, Moot is in fact a skinny white dude but this seems to be a different one (insert racially insensitive comment about skinny white guys all looking the same to me at long distance and low res, hey recognizing the problem is more than half way to fixing it). And its all rather tasteless humor so I scrolled past it pretty quick for better stuff (aka pretty much ANYTHING other than jokes about blown up people) I'm surprised this is still "of interest" today.
The properly journalistic way to look at this is in context, you REALLY need to look for instance at the reddit posts on the same topic immediately before and after which show the probably late mr dorner being responsible in one via some pretty amusing CSI style animated gif photoshop work, and another photoshop job doing the same with spiderman (no kidding). And some dumb anime ones, and the usual racial slurs, etc. However in a giant sea of photoshops, this one story is gaining traction. Probably because its politically correct to assume an angry white dude did it, whereas the similar photoshops of arabs in turbans are too politically incorrect (aside from also being completely ridiculous and tasteless).
Now the question of the day is who is this dude who probably got photoshopped in, and I'm not a huge Stargate fan by any means (err, well...) but I am about 95% sure this was a generic uniformed dude from SG:U or SG:Atlantis. Now it could all be real in which case SG:U or SG:Atlantis uniforms are going to be solely for the tasteless next Halloween, or its just vaguely coincidental that the the SG uniform people used some pretty much off the shelf stuff from Gander Mountain or uscav and it means pretty much nothing.
I wrote a bunch of stuff about which episode of SG:U I think this uniform and backpack comes from, but the pix is so low res and I'm working from memory, so I deleted it.
I don't know whats more embarrassing, a bunch of people getting all worked up believing one pix on a site known for "funny" photoshops is authentic, or me admitting in public that I watch syfy network sometimes, even worse I got roped into watching SG:U and I'm still kinda pissed they never had any closure to the series.
I guess if there is any "startup lesson" here for the HN community its that you can't usefully research something in total isolation of its surroundings.
That doesn't mean its absolutely false, just probably. For gods sakes whoever is doing this research for real, do us all a favor and DO NOT publish it in the funny photoshops section if you want it taken seriously, OK? Frankly anywhere else would be better.
This doesn't mean its all a waste of time. If the pix are not photoshopped, and if for example the SG:U costume department bought its backpacks and shirts and caps from Cabellas Outfitters or REI or whatever, and the dude in the pix shopped fairly recently at the same place, extensive research into that topic MIGHT help the authorities.
The writers ran out of ideas in SG:U and it never should have been a series. Would have been a great movie or short mini-series.
There's probably a startup lesson about ambition in the SG_U story, something about designing a great six hour product results in disaster if "success" descends on you and you've suddenly gotta fill dozens of hours, any way possible. If they did a SG:U miniseries we'd probably still be ranting about how it was the best miniseries in years, etc.
Unofficial Stargate Universe, Season 3 (scripts) http://laurencemoroney.azurewebsites.net/?page_id=2
Not telling anything for days isn't acceptable anymore -- the government used to get away with these kinds of things because it used to control the narrative, but it can't do that anymore.
The media? No the FBI did that. "The media" ought to have known better, and still hasn't learned better.
I would have guessed the libel, which I will not repeat here.
Memory sucks.
In fact the mob in this case seems to be showing a lot of common sense with top voted comments like the parent here urging caution.