Hacking suspect Ryan Cleary 'has Asperger's syndrome'

Ouch. That headline puts us in a bad light. Worse, it doesn't even convey any new information as people with Aspergers tend to be more concentrated in the computer sciences than other fields. Who hacks into things? Likely only computer scientists. But you knew that already. What you didn't know is that people with Aspergers are going to hack your website! Alert the presses! "Aspergers made do it! Mein leben!"

This headline is like saying "Rape suspect deemed to be a homosexual!" Even though it may be true in many cases, everyone infers the wrong association from it.

I'm disappointed the BBC chose to frame it this way. They could have conveyed the same information by focusing on what he did, not what they think caused him to do it.

We're reaching a stage where banning somebody from all Internet access is over the top, even for crimes like this. This would prevent him from accessing online billing for utilities, banking, and many government services.

Some banks are even beginning to charge additional fees for services performed over physical mail.

Before long a ban from the Internet will be equivalent to a ban from electricity. At that point the criminal's life will be unreasonably disadvantaged, regardless of the scope of their crime (and this guy's crime is arguably less serious than that of the creators of StuxNet, for example)

This whole new wave of Asperger's kind of bothers me. 10 years ago, we were just called "nerds". Now, the medical community has decided that being a nerd is a mental disorder, as if being highly intelligent with poor social skills means you are mentally deformed. At what point did "they" decide being mildly different is a disorder? It's not as if Asperger's makes someone potentially more dangerous, like a sociopath. At what point will "fun" new drugs come to market that will make "suffers" of Asperger's less intelligent and more social, like a fan of "Jersey Shore"?

I'm sure there are cases where an "Autism spectrum disorder" diagnosis is appropriate, but I really think that Asperger's is over diagnosed.

He DDoSed my friend's imageboard, and he joined our IRC to brag about it. He DEFINITELY has mental problems -- he was threatening to fry everyone's Internet with his botnet and he also threatened to DDoS my startup.

I love when the official government media outlet for a first-world power focuses on something like this. Does this mean they're giving him a pass? Or does it mean the UK will start preemptively arresting everybody with Asperger's as a threat to national security? If neither: What relevance does it have to any of this?