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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

Reading this article http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/12/4693710/the-end-of-kindnes... makes me feel not too terrible that he's being thrown in jail.

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Weev's a right shithead, you're absolutely right.

I still bailed him out of jail for the time leading up to and during his trial. Why? Because UNPOPULAR SPEECH SHOULD NEVER BE CRIMINAL, no matter how revolting. Indeed, it is the unpopular and revolting stuff that needs the most defending:

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." —H.L. Mencken

I have no information of the case at hand, but that could the reason why the prosecutor went for hacking charges instead of harassment.

There's a huge gap between unpopular speech and harassment, which is illegal, and in many cases criminal. I agree he should not be in jail for the crime he was convicted of, but he almost certainly deserves to be there otherwise.

By "unpopular speech", do you mean the AT&T bit, or the harassment bit? If the latter, I disagree. A free and fair society can certainly draw a line between "unpopular speech" and "criminal harassment."

If I were to threaten to murder you, you wouldn't expect the police to say "Eh, nothing we can do, he's got a right to free speech. Call us back after he shoots you, you'll have a case then."

If I were to threaten to murder you, you wouldn't expect the police to say "Eh, nothing we can do, he's got a right to free speech. Call us back after he shoots you, you'll have a case then."

This is the problem with thought experiments regarding crime: they always make the facts 100% certain, when in real life, the facts are never 100% certain. If we were to rephrase your thought experiment, it would be:

"Some guy said some other guy was going to kill him. Let's throw that some other guy in prison for a while, just in case."

Not quite as clear-cut as you think, is it?

If only there were some way to determine what was meant. Barring that, maybe it's best not go around saying such things if you can't even convince one out of twelve people that you weren't serious.

Regardless of whether you truly intend to carry out the threat, the threat itself is a form of violence. It imposes your will on an unwilling subject.

If you rob a bank with an unloaded gun, you can't claim afterwards, "oh, they were perfectly safe and didn't actually have to give me the money, so therefore it wasn't a crime."

No, you missed my point. My point is that anyone can accuse anyone of a crime, so the law has to reduce the incentive for someone to make something up to get attention or revenge. "He said he would kill me," is nearly impossible to prove, so if you punish it severely, you create a cure that's worse than the disease. If you restrict it to certified letters, though, then you have a better balance.

Don't we already have laws against filing a false report? I think I agree with you, but I'm not sure that the problem you described exists.

"Not quite as clear-cut as you think, is it?"

Weev did literally threaten to murder Kathy Sierra, and he then bragged about doing so on multiple public websites. So, yes, it is quite clear-cut.

(And, please, at least think for a minute before you try to rebut by saying that he didn't mean it, so it shouldn't count.)

Were you at the keyboard when he was typing this message?

Why, you're right. I don't know for sure that the NSA didn't fake dozens of threatening emails from Weev, and several forum posts, and then used mind-control satellites to keep him from posting that it wasn't him or telling any of his meatspace friends that it wasn't him, and then used mind-control satellites again to make him brag in person to that reporter. Oooh, or maybe they used mind-control satellites on the reporter to make him slander Weev's good name, and MCS once more to keep all the people in the article from revealing the truth!

Give it up, man. The guy whose image you're trying to clean prefers it nice and dirty.

I think most of society can live with death threats being criminal.

sneak you're one of the few "true Americans" (as in when people talk about upholding freedom above all else) and unless I remember your posts wrong, you've had to leave the country to feel free. It's truly a sad state of affairs.

Sir Thomas More: What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

Woah, I am still against his prosecution but I don't really feel sorry for him now. Some people are just sick, why would he do that to a person for no reason?

FTA: "His rise as a folk hero is a sign of how desensitized to the abuse of women online people have become," Sierra said. "I get so angry at the tech press, the way they try to spin him as a trickster, a prankster. It’s like they feel they have to at least say he’s a jerk. Openly admitting you enjoy ‘ruining lives for lulz’ is way past being a ‘jerk’. And it wasn’t just my life. He included my kids in his work. I think he does belong in prison for crimes he has committed, but what he’s in for now is not one of those crimes. I hate supporting the Free Weev movement, but I do."

She is so much better person than I am.

From the internet, Kathy is a very nice and decent person. What happened to her is awful, and I'm glad she's still around, albeit in her reduced online presence. Shame on us all.

Of course he deserves to be in jail, but he should be in jail under harassment and identity theft laws instead of the hacking charges.

Exactly! In the United States, there are protections for that: Libel & Slander

Which is why he was convicted of. Harassment laws could also be implemented, depending on the jurisdiction.

Throwing him in jail is an awful outcome for justice and for the precendent it sets. I'm very much hoping he walks out of court a free man. Once outside the court, he could get hit by a bus as far as I'm concerned.

When we want weev free, we're fighting for law and society, for just principles, not for the individual.

I was with you up until wishing another human dead.

To be fair, there is an important difference between wishing someone got hit by a bus and simply not caring if they did get hit by a bus. I, for one, would not want him dead, as death is rather an overly severe punishment for his actual crimes. I would probably even think it somewhat unfortunate if he actually did get hit by a bus, simply because humans dying in general is unfortunate. But, were it to happen, an honest evaluation of my feelings leads me to predict that I would not weep.

We could also wish that Weev or people like him did not exist, without actually wishing that anyone now alive become dead, or predicting what our feelings might be were such a thing to happen.

I may have not formulated that as subtle as I meant, since English is not my primary language. So my apologies for that. I do not wish him dead. I mean that I'll fight for him in this case since it's important for society, but since he's such an awful person I would lose all interest in him after he's out of court.

Read it as a figure of speech, since we technology people always speak about people who might get hit by a bus when thinking about the future of products.

No, your meaning was clear. That guy was either trolling by deliberately misinterpreting you, or needs English lessons himself.

What is the greatest harm that someone has caused you? Just curious.

He belongs in prison for a long time, but not for what he's currently being prosecuted for. It sets a terrible precedent, and I'm sure that, given his personality, he'll be prosecutable for something again soon enough.

If memory serves, he was actually busted for drug possession not long after the gawker article went up, but he's not actually being prosecuted for that is he?

You're missing the point. The point is the government is charging him under the CFAA and that will set an extremely dangerous precedent.

If they want to charge him under any other numerous crimes (data theft, attempted extortion, being an asshat) then I wouldn't have a problem with it either because those are things he's guilty/might-be-guilty of.

Hacking and violating the CFAA is not one of his crimes.

He did something equivalent to scanning a public bulletin board for information that AT&T put there through what seems like sheer incompetence. There does not seem to be any hacking involved unless you also classify google as an automated hacking engine. I feel bad that someone might get jail time and a felony conviction for crawling a public forum.

And I wish the Westboro Baptist Church and a variety of other people who do objectionable things could be thrown in jail, but not by abusing laws and setting terrible precedents for further abuse.

The reason to defend weev in this case is to ensure that the specific act for which he is being prosecuted is not treated as a crime in other cases.

If weev harassed this woman in the manner described in the article you reference, he probably should be prosecuted for that. But it's not ok for prosecutors to put him in jail for something that should be perfectly legal, just because they can't (or didn't) put him in jail for something else.

The acts described in the article probably should have put him in jail. The latest is unrelated though.

That link is baffling, the first few paragraphs sound like bad things happening but they don't form any sort of coherent narrative and the link to the New York Times article is a story about someone else entirely.

It has the form of an outrage article without any actual content, as if someone fed Tumblr and Vice magazine into a Markov text generator.

Popular people -- and popular rights -- can be defined as "the ones that don't need defending."

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