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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

That stood out to me too, and in this case it’s unfortunate, but keep in mind:

1- It’s factually correct, hacking & spying is illegal. It can land a hacker serious jail time, regardless of how morally good their intentions are, and regardless of how morally bad the people being hacked are.

2- You can interpret the disclaimer as a warning to other vigilante hackers wanting to do good. Think of it not as that Jim is being vilified, but it’s a message to you to be careful.

3- Think of it as a standard disclaimer, like you see on many products you buy. It could be a liability concern for the BBC to report on vigilante hacking against scammers if they were judged by the UK government to be glorifying and encouraging hacking.

Let the fact that they’re reporting on this story and showing the videos and shaming the scammers speak for itself and outweigh the annoying disclaimer.

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Illegal and illegal don’t apply when the party you are attacking isn’t part of the same legal framework. This is equivalent to ripping off a drug dealer, the dealer can’t exactly contact the police and ask for help

> Illegal and illegal don’t apply when the party you are attacking isn’t part of the same legal framework.

This is at best an oversimplification.

> This is equivalent to ripping off a drug dealer, the dealer can’t exactly contact the police and ask for help

If you go about murdering drug dealers "they're part of a different legal framework!" isn't going to get you far in your defense trial. Murder remains illegal regardless. It remains illegal if you do so if the drug dealer lives in another country as well.

Now, prosecution may be difficult - lack of cooperation from those involved, sympathetic juries and competing polities adding extra political elements and hurdles, and ambiguity over which system should do the prosecution, etc. - but saying "illegal doesn't apply" is overstating things, especially if, say, the other party is ever a bit more sympathetic - perhaps an innocent person caught in the crossfire of someone's overly aggressive vigilante campaign.

In the UK prosecutions are brought on behalf of the Queen (it is the Crown Prosecution Service), you don't escape that framework because your victim has potentially broken other laws.

Careful with that line of justification. Although your intentions are different, expats (and colonists) have been able to use similar justifications in the past to rationalize rape and slavery in a foreign land under a different legal framework where the victims can’t exactly contact the police and ask for help.

This is why we have human rights.

Now, it is true that these hacking victims (the call center) can’t exactly call the police. I mean they can, but they’d just end up volunteering to go to prison (or whatever the reprimand is for their own crimes). Still, they do operate under the same legal framework as all the law abiding people in India.

More than a disclaimer. Many people wouldn't realise that such vigilantism is illegal, it's raising awareness.

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