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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

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

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