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Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

He's innocent in court (and my non-lawyerly (aka worthless) sense says the fifth amendment favors him).

But we're not a court, and our standard for speech shouldn't be "beyond a reasonable doubt". The parent poster was right. His failing was looking at child pornography.

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What should our standard be? Being accused equals being guilty?

Tread carefully. The protections you give others are the protections you'll enjoy yourself if needed. And hoping you'll never need them is a very shortsighted strategy.

Well said.

But we're not a court, and our standard for speech shouldn't be "beyond a reasonable doubt". The parent poster was right. His failing was looking at child pornography.

That's what you think until you're falsely accused of such a crime...

For everyone who's poo-poohing this, go read the government's brief (https://arstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/fedsrawls...). There are logs that show him visiting child pornography groups, there are recorded requests of him accessing files whose hashes matched child pornography, his sister says he showed her child porn and told his entire family that he had a problem with child pornography, and he admitted that he may have been emailed child pornography.

Now, replace child pornography with any other thing. Would you question me saying that he'd been downloading that thing?

Says who? Neither of us saw it, so we can't know.

There's a procedure though that we use to determine the likelihood of someone's guilt, based on evidence and legal arguments. Would you like to hear about it?

I think it's legitimate to say, in a discussion like this one where we're not dealing with punishment, that we should hold to a weaker standard (preponderance of evidence?) than should a criminal court.

That said, as far as I'm aware the only evidence we've seen is that he's been accused of the crime. I don't what portion of accusations are false (or even a proxy like conviction rate in comparable situations).

That might seem reasonable at first glance, but it tends to turn into a witch hunt — especially with modern day communication channels.

That is, you are effectively dealing with punishment (by treating a suspect as a criminal and tarnishing their reputation before being convicted) by not applying the same rigour as the courts.

I agree that social condemnation - especially mass condemnation - is a form of punishment, and should be treated with corresponding care. But I reject the attempt to extend that to all related reasoning - it is specifically a question of requiring a high confidence for punishment.

There's a lot more evidence in the government brief, which was linked in the article.

Fair enough.

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