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Comment by madaxe | Hacker News Reader

These master hackers should all be put in solitary for 30 years, for deliberately circumventing a digital protection system and thus breaking the CFAA.

Perhaps then people may begin to understand why these laws are ridiculous.

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No. Tech-savvy people already understand why they're ridiculous. The non-techies are still generally scared of or intimidated by tech stuff, and would simply view that as acceptable punishment for 'hackers' ('hacker' being defined as someone who uses a computer for more than facebook and angrybirds).

Non-tech-savvy folks I would hope would understand the wrongness of a bunch of children being thrown in solitary for wanting to play Angry Birds.

If the American people can't and won't see the wrongness in that, then America truly is utterly doomed, and its populace deserves the darkness that will ensue.

I don't specifically see 'tech ignorance' in the US - the few places I've travelled (spain, uk, australia, russia) - tech ignorance is the norm. Get beyond turning on the table/phone/desktop, sending emails, using facebook, etc - the average person is effectively lost.

That might actually work, despite being unethical, since it would create outrage over the punishment victims' plight... The only reason the draconian punishment regime we call the war on drugs fails to elicit outrage is because it only sends The Other (the poor and the unfortunately hued or both) to jail.

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